title: Should I choose ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl for Windows?
body: <p>I'm totally new to Perl, but I'd like to try it out. I read about two rival distributions available for Windows platform (I guess there's <em>just</em> Perl on other OSes :).</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl" rel="noreferrer">Wikipedia</a> says that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Perl" rel="noreferrer">Strawberry Perl</a> comes with additional development tools to compile CPAN modules if necessary. It sounds pretty good to me.</p>
  
  <p>It also says that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivePerl" rel="noreferrer">ActivePerl</a> has a lot of prepackaged modules which are easier to install with PPM. It sounds great too!</p>
  
  <p>There's a clear trade-off between those two. And I wonder: What should I pick to get started? If I pick one how hard, is it to migrate to the other?</p>
  
  <hr/>
  
  <p>I gave both distributions a run for a couple of weeks. I actually liked both which is a good thing! <em>One can't go wrong with either of these.</em> I ended up going with ActivePerl simply because it comes with offline documentation<sub>(in HTML)</sub> - a great life-savior for those who are on the road or just not always connected. It was super-easy for me to get started with Perl language while I was on vacation when I wasn't always online.</p>
  
  <p>Strawberry Perl is at least as great if not greater. So I can totally recommend it, too. And I have to say one should just learn Perl - it's a very beautiful language. Give it a try!</p>