Strawberry Perl works well. You are / your newcomer is likely to need some use of the command prompt to see STDOUT & STDERR & use the cpan[m] tool, but file associations can be set up automagically by the installation process (I'll accept corrections on this), meaning that double clicking on a .pl in the explorer will Just Work. Also, the path to Perl itself is automatically created as part of the install process, so it can be run from any directory. But the real question is the purpose. Are you going to be writing Perl for $newcomer to execute, or will $newcomer be writing Perl? My experience of WinPerl IDEs has left me unimpressed. Padre was written by our own szabgab and I know one person who swears by ActiveState's Komodo, but I prefer Notepad++ with a command prompt to execute the files as & when I wish. But then I LIKE text interfaces.

If you want a cheap Linux box & are prepared to settle for 4Gb of RAM, consider a Raspberry Pi. You will have to add the hard disc over USB, but it may well be way under your budget & is likely to be more fun. Again, purpose matters here.

Regards,

John Davies

Update: I see your interest in WSL suggestions. If you want a comparable variant & aren't scared of an old version, git comes with Perl 5.8.8 on Windows. 
 
C:\Git\bin>.\perl.exe -v

This is perl, v5.8.8 built for msys

[download]

In reply to Re: New-to-Perl: recommendations for windows setup? (updated) by davies
in thread New-to-Perl: recommendations for windows setup? by bliako

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.