True, a full Cygwin install is a beast that consumes a chunk of storage. I don't mind, mine's an old machine but it has two terabytes of hard drives. Since I have just one PC here in the office I run Ubuntu Saucy in a VirtualBox. Give it a couple of cores and it runs reasonably sprightly. Not like a dedicated box but it's what I can afford. :-}

I might be more tolerant of present-day performance 'cos I remember all too well how things were when I began programming. I wrote programs with a pen on IBM FORTRAN coding sheets, sent them off by weekly courier to a college a hundred miles away where a keypunch operator turned them into cards. The cards got run into an IBM 709 or possibly 7090, not sure which. A week or (more likely) two later I got back the cards plus a thick sheaf of greenbar cover pages, accounting data, and error messages. If I was lucky there'd be a page or two of program output somewhere in there. It's amazing I ever managed to learn anything that way. (Now that I think about it, that was a mighty "monastic" way to code.) Five or six years later I finally got access to an interactive terminal. (eta: IBM Selectric set up for APL\360 with a dedicated phone line to the mainframe at the College of William and Mary.) Rarely have I been so glad to see an epoch end.

Beg pardon, too much nostalgic off-topicness. Back to Perl and instant gratification, yay!