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Visual Studio Express is Microsoft's zero-cash programming environment. Why do you want a high-cost office suite with a lousy macro engine to be discounted to free when they already offer their actual development suite pro bono. It's upgradeable to more complete Visual Studio versions later. This will encourage Microsoft-centric code, but that can be avoided and it's less specific of a tie-in than VBA. C#, C, C++, and more are included.

If you don't want to be tied to Microsoft-specific tools even on Windows there are other options. Those include other office suites and other actual development tools.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have OOBasic and can be scripted with Python and Java if you really want. These things are zero-cash and open source.

You can use Lazarus and FreePascal (Wikipedia article about FreePascal) or Eclipse and Java/C/C++ if you'd rather. Or you could use Eric and Python. Or Padre and Strawberry Perl, complete with MinGW. Some of the IDEs are more or less general and language agnostic, while others are mainly narrowly targeted.

Don't forget MsysGit (git for Windows) if you're not using Cygwin and haven't already chosen a version control system.

Really, you could be teaching with a good programmer's editor rather than specifically with IDEs too. vim, Emacs, jEdit, Gedit, and others are applicable. Some of them are powerful enough to make that line between editors and IDEs very fuzzy.

What, exactly, would a free copy of Word get you that isn't already available?

Yeah, I would like a Perl plugin as well. OK, don't laugh! I still write Perl code on occasion.

There have been rumors floating around like you mentioned, and I think that there is even an alpha plugin that does syntax highlighting. Unfortunately, there isn't much else.

I end up using Perl Padre for my Perl programming, but like you I'm not wild about running multiple IDEs.

To test out Perl 6 in an IDE environment, try Padre.
http://padre.perlide.org/download.html

NOTE 1: Install the 'Padre Standalone Plus Six' package, not the 'Padre Standalone' package)

NOTE 2: If you install it on windows, ensure you have a few hundred MB to spare on c:\ -- the drive targeting for the Install MSI does not work properly yet.

For your first two points, try Padre. For your fourth point, try MooseX::Declare.

I disagree on your third point. Ouch.

FYI, the new Padre Perl IDE is itself written in Perl.

http://padre.perlide.org/wiki/Screenshots

Trippy

... for Perl the Padre IDE is getting pretty awesome.

Works identically on Windows, Mac and Linux and they even managed to get the entire IDE to install itself from the CPAN.

> 1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.

Padre is improving in leaps and bounds so that problem should hopefully be gone soon.

1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE

Have you seen Padre?. A Perl IDE written in Perl.