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Is it that hard to install and maintain? Strawberry Perl works great on Windows. I haven't found it to be any more awkward install and use than Python on Windows.

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?

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?

Know any example of a Windows-compatible open source project that doesn't distribute binaries?

Almost all of the ones I have downloaded recently don't distribute binaries for Windows. Usually someone else forks the project and makes their own installer like http://rubyinstaller.org/ for example. Or, http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads or http://strawberryperl.com/ or http://dwimperl.com/windows.html . The makers of popular languages like Perl and Ruby don't bother making installers. They just put up links to other people who do it. Some times other projects lag significantly behind the main project.

Funny, I've never had any problem with Strawberry Perl on Windows. Can't recall any problems with Cygwin either, though I haven't tried it in years.

I suggest Perl as you can get a fully portable environment here at Strawberry Perl. Any text editor or portable IDE will do, from Notepad++ to eclips, which incidentally both have portable setups.

If you're comfortable with Perl, it's definitely something you can bring with you to the Windows world. You can use Strawberry Perl with or without Cygwin. If you need to deploy code, you can use PAR::Packer's pp utility to wrap your script, its included modules, and the perl interpreter into a standalone executable.

Perl can do a ridiculous amount of stuff when you start using modules from CPAN. The Windows world is very GUI heavy, but a lot of things can be done using CPAN modules. Writing to Word docs. Controlling VMWare. Networking with just about every protocol you can think of. Creating GUI applications for others to use. There's also a nifty little module called Win32::GuiTest which will let you programmatically control GUI programs that don't provide a command line interface.

Good luck!

DBD::WMI
Win32::OLE
Win32::WMIC
Win32::GuiTest
Win32::TieRegistry
Win32::Unicode
Win32::API
Inline::C
Perl::Dist::WiX
Win32::MSI::HighLevel
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=win32&mode=dist
http://roth.net/
http://books.perl.org/books
Perl Books - Book: Perl for System Administration
http://www.perl.com/
http://strawberryperl.com/
http://www.cava.co.uk/citrusperl/strawberry.html
google:// site:http://perlmonks.org/

Even better Strawberry Perl

Last time my project got mentioned on Slashdot, I saw around 50,000 additional downloads for that release.

So even if it's one-shot, that one-shot can still be big.

You don't even get a Perl or Python interpreter preinstalled in Windows; how backward can you get?

What place does Perl and Python have in the default install of an OS?

Python comes pre-installed on Mac OS X, but due to Apple's release cycle, it's often one or even two years old. The overwhelming recommendation of the "MacPython" community is to upgrade your Python by downloading and installing a newer version from the Python standard release page. Python on the Mac

If you are running a Linux system (or most UNIX systems, including Mac OS X), you probably already have an installation of perl. Type perl -v at the command line to find out which version. Get Perl

A 100% Open Source Perl for Windows that is exactly the same
as Perl everywhere else. And now it's rebuilt from scratch! We've partnered with Microsoft to improve CPAN on Win32. Our new WiX-based MSI installer enables Active Directory Group Policy installation across your entire organisation. New bundled support for the world's most popular Open Source database MySQL, plus SQLite and ODBC clients. And some little things, like installer clash detection logic, a cleaner uninstall, and Perl upgrade support. Strawberry Perl For Windows

And yeah... Sometimes I even miss the CLI and the joys of mpg123, mikmod, vim, and making a simple Perl script to modify 1000+ HTML files in the blink of an eye...

Vim is available for Windows, both as a console mode application and native Win32 GUI. Quite a few programmers I know actually use it as their primary editor.

Perl is absolutely there. Don't bother with ActiveState, go for Strawberry Perl for maximum portability.

Regarding CLI in general, I'd suggest looking into PowerShell. MS is investing pretty heavily into it and seem determined to move all Windows admins to it (oh, those poor MCSEs!). It is in general pretty nicely done, and logically extends and generalizes the original concept of the Unix shell in a way that makes more sense for some use cases (raw byte streams are not always the best way of passing data around).

If you're just feeling nostalgic for bash and zsh, you have several options. The GNU-Win32 project provides native (MinGW-based) ports for a lot of Unix utilities, including bash. Cygwin is a popular alternative that provides more faithful emulation of Unix environment on top of Win32 - including fork(), symlinks, and so on. Finally, there's Microsoft SUA ("Subsystem for Unix Applications"), which is a WinNT POSIX-compatible subsystem. Note that, unlike Cygwin, it's not build on top of Win32 - it's another subsystem, working in parallel to Win32, directly on top of the NT kernel. It has quite a few Unix utilities ported to it, including bash and Perl. This one actually comes for free in Win2008, and also Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

Maybe this link will be a little more useful: http://strawberryperl.com/

If all you want to do is Perl 5 on Windows there are a few ports -- see ActivePerl and IndigoPerl.

And, of course, the understandably famous Strawberry Perl. I currently work on Windows servers which run ActivePerl as CGI, and it all works peachy, but it's nice to know we have other options to fall back on if ActiveState lets us down.

at OSCON this year, I seem to recall a talk on "Strawberry Perl" http://strawberryperl.com/ - apologies as I can't remember the developer's name, but basically if I recall correctly this is meant to be a quick easy way to get perl working on Windows boxes, fully CPAN compliant. I believe he was working on "Chocolate Perl" as well. Not sure if this will work with what you want but it should be a start. The problem with active perl is that it is no longer being supported.

FWIW, Adam (the other commenter in this thread) has written an excellent distribution called Strawberry Perl:

http://strawberryperl.com/

You should try it out if you are on Windows. If you're on some other OS, apt-get install perl or equivalent should do the trick.

Suits who pick the technology are usually wrong, and seldom obeyed.

Strawberry Perl and ActivePerl are both pretty nice packages. Many Win32 modules like Win32::OLE, Win32::API, and more in the Win32 and Win32API namespaces are perfectly usable.

The places most qualified to answer specific questions are probably comp.lang.perl.moderated (or maybe comp.lang.perl.misc) and Perlmonks. I don't know too much first-hand about PerlGuru, but they do have a section specific to Win32 programming with Perl and I've heard some good things.

You probably should have had a look at Strawberry Perl.

Most of the Perl technocrati abandoned ActivePerl for it over the last year, because all the CPAN modules Just Work.

(Full Disclosure: I made Strawberry) :)

I know... Python and Ruby and Java are the hot languages, and you think Perl is going the way of COBOL. Well f*ck it - I like perl. And, there are some great reasons to use it:
1. I already know it. I learned it before Ruby was "cool".
2. It's already installed on every Linux and BSD machine. Yes, that means I can run my script on your brand new Ubuntu desktop, or your 1998 BSD server. And it'll work.
3. Great Regex support (am not saying your language de-jour doesn't, just that perl does)
4. CPAN is one of the most extensive software libraries known to mankind.
5. It really doesn't matter if you use it or not - perl is here for the long haul. Too many linux utilities depend on it. My linux box doesn't have ruby or python installed, and I haven't had any problems. Try deleting perl from yours!

So, if you are like me, you already know Perl. Maybe you don't use windows at home, but you have to use it at work. I suggest you download Strawberry Perl (or go all-out with cygwin).
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be great support for perl with .NET. So, I guess we have to stick with the Win32 CPAN modules you already know about.
But maybe, just maybe, someone will come along one day... and viola! Perl.NET!

Until that day comes, I will continue to use perl anyway, and all of you Haters out there can go $@_{s/;//g}!

The language for a specific Java version might be consistent but the libraries won't be. Between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 there were/are huge changes in the language and libraries, some which broke some of our applications because they went ahead and deprecated some functionality.

I agree that C and Javascript are also a huge pain to work with between versions but you can't say the same about perl. Perl has maintained an incredible job at being backwards compatible with some pretty ugly code. We've been able to take perl code that was written 6 to 8 years ago under perl 5.5 and dump it on perl 5.8.7 without any changes. Some perl libraries you can get from cpan are only compatible with a certain newer version of perl (usually 5.6) but that's because they probably utilize/need newer features in perl. The same is true for Java where 1.4.2 has things that 1.3 didn't have and 1.5 has things that 1.4 didn't have.

You also mention ActiveState perl which kinda went in their own direction as far as packages and other things. But if you want perl for windows that is closer to perl for nix then you might want to try Strawberry perl. Strawberry perl includes a Mingw C/C++ compiler and a "make" tool so you can use cpan.