I agree. I don't think there's any point in shielding people from the truth, but at the same time, there's no point in scaring people off when you can easily avoid it. A better answer to the question might've been:

"The ususal way is to use the perl debugger (point to PODs), but there are graphical altneratives available (preferably point to those)."

I think this highlights a small attitude in the Perl community along the lines of "you're not a *real* developer unless you use vim / *NIX / CLI, etc". Just to emphasise, I do think this is a *small* problem, but not an insignificant one, not least because some of the "higher ups" in the community can sometimes give this impression (even if it's not intentional).

Maybe vim + CLI works for you, but a huge amount of developers prefer to work in a fully functional IDE these days.