Should I choose ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl for Windows?
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 just Perl on other OSes :).
Wikipedia says that Strawberry Perl comes with additional development tools to compile CPAN modules if necessary. It sounds pretty good to me.
It also says that ActivePerl has a lot of prepackaged modules which are easier to install with PPM. It sounds great too!
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?
I gave both distributions a run for a couple of weeks. I actually liked both which is a good thing! One can't go wrong with either of these. I ended up going with ActivePerl simply because it comes with offline documentation(in HTML) - 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.
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!
Answer
Strawberry Perl uses CPAN, which means that you are up to date as far as modules are concerned. When things are added to CPAN, you have immediate access to them. Strawberry Perl also comes with MinGW which means that Strawberry Perl can use quite a few XS modules directly from CPAN without any modification. The MinGW distribution comes with gcc, make, ld and other tools to help you build modules. I think Strawberry Perl also comes with a few modules that let you install PPMs (Perl Package Manager files).
ActivePerl installs modules using its own format called PPM (Perl Package Manager). The official repository is hosted by ActiveState. You can find PPMs for most of the popular modules so you shouldn't have any trouble unless you are looking for an obscure or really new package (so bleeding-edge stuff won't work because PPM usually lags behind CPAN). Although easier to install than CPAN modules, PPMs are specifically created for Windows and so some CPAN modules will not work (because they do Unix-specific things).
I have used both before and it seemed to work for most cases. But I lean towards Strawberry Perl because the environment is closer to Unix and so there are not many incompatibilities. On the other hand, ActivePerl is made for Windows and so it works with Windows very well.
Another option is to install Cygwin and Perl that comes with Cygwin. I have done that before and it works reasonably well. You also get access to CPAN.
Pick what you think works best for you.