Recently, Adam has been funded by The Perl Foundation, Perl in Israel, and Stonehenge to use Perl from nothing but his flash drive. This provides an excellent motivation to get Strawberry Perl working in a highly portable way.

Originally, Perl was awesome and worked everywhere—except Windows. That was okay, because Windows didn’t matter. No one did any real work on Windows. Then, around 1995, Windows started to matter. A brief history of Perl on Windows followed, resulting in what is today ActiveState.

Much of what Adam wrote for PPI does not work in ActivePerl, which makes it a non-starter for him, as he tends to work on Windows. Anything depending on Scalar::Util or List::MoreUtils modules will not work with the ActivePerl build system. This led to an embarrassing problem for Adam when he gave a talk three years ago at OSCON. He couldn’t give his demo, because PPI would not build in ActivePerl. In fact, ActiveState’s package manager has gotten so much worse that almost any module that is at all useful does not exist—and thus nothing useful can be done on Windows (big surprise).

Moving away from ActiveState, this talk is essentially about Adam trying to get his own laptop to work. That’s really all he wants. It’s a modest desire. More importantly, the CPAN module has to work. Without that, what’s the use of Perl?

So Adam offered a prize: a yard-high stack of cases of any beer desired by the first person who could provide a fully-installable and working (by the above definition of working) version of Perl for Windows. After six months and no sign of a winner, he changed the prize to “craploads” of beer. In 24 hours, he received two entries. The winner cheated a lot, but the loser was Vanilla Perl, which has become a testing ground for experimentation.

Strawberry Perl is the Perl for Windows designed for people who don’t use Windows. That is, the people who do all of their work on Unix or Unix-like systems—Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. The main goal of the project is to make it easy—it is Perl, after all.

In the future will come Chocolate Perl—completing the holy trinity of neopolitan flavors—for people who know Windows, but don’t know Perl, and thus the Unix-like characteristics of Perl.

The target of Adam’s financial support is Portable Perl: Perl for flash drives. Carry it around, install CPAN modules onto, or from, the flash drive. It’s network-aware, does the right thing, and juliennes fries. An excellent standard being developed for portable apps is, in fact, PortableApps.com, where applications such as Firefox or Putty can be downloaded and installed to those ever-growing flash drives.

Available Thursday at the Perl Foundation‘s booth in the expo hall will be branded flash drives with Portable Perl on them. At least, I think I heard that correctly.

I really like the work Adam is doing. He’s accomplished so much to get Perl everywhere. That’s a cause I can get behind.

“The main problem today is Vista.”
— Adam Kennedy

Okay, I took that out of context, but I couldn’t resist capturing the quote. What he really means is that changes made to Windows in Vista have made things not work, in particular the access control. It’s not an unusual problem when upgrading to new systems, but it is more difficult with proprietary platforms, which Open Source authors have very little access to.