Cygwin is awesome and mighty, but hardly lightweight. I can have msys, msys git, Strawberry Perl, and a decent terminal emulator on a Windows PC and not worry about disk space, differences in paths between inside Cygwin and outside it, etc. Having bash and the usual command-line stuff within native Windows is a pretty nice thing.
I don't in practice do this much these days. I have Windows at home only for games (one laptop and one desktop). I have a desktop, two laptops, and a server with Linux. My girlfriend has an Air and will soon have a Linux desktop. For work I have OS X for a desktop and laptop but do most of my work on Linux VMs. I don't really need to use Windows for anything, but it makes a nicely flexible and upgradable gaming console. I have spent plenty of time on DOS, Windows, NetWare, OS/2, Apple DOS, BeOS, and other systems, too. Linux and the open source BSDs weren't announced yet when I started using computers.
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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!
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