In the recent months, I have set up some shell-script-based framework to 
run benchmarks (and verify output) on experimental POV-Ray versions.

So far, so good.

I'm not too happy with the current solution though: It's good as far as 
command-line tools go, but I'd like to take it further towards an 
interactive GUI thing.

Any recommendations for the tool of choice?

I'm looking for a language - or toolkit - that is easy to learn for me, 
and easy to throw together some user interface as well as 
shell-script-ish program logic.

The user interface should have some rather elaborate support for tables: 
Popup context menus and per-cell background color will me minimum, bells 
& whistles like merged cells, elaborate cell formatting options, varying 
grid line widths or even images in table cells would be nice to have. A 
GUI element to display images is an absolute must.

Other than that, it must be easy to run external commands and process 
their output, ideally with a means to "time" the external command (both 
CPU and wall-clock time). Support for Sqlite3 databases would be nice.

I guess that Tcl/Tk and Perl might fit the bill; how about Python or 
Ruby? And which of all these would you recommend to someone presently 
actively using C/C++, some Unix shell scripting, a bit of JavaScript, 
and of course POV-Ray SDL?

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