Absolutely Data::Dumper has its place. I swear by it. (And am writing and have written several versions of different flavours, none as good :-) By horribly inefficient I meant the process of dumping and of parsing. The fact that it performs so well was suprising to me. The fact that it only took twice as long to load as Storable is a good comment on the quality of perls parsing.

However I'm willing to bet good money that the dump times showed Storable doing much better.

Of course this doesn't address your point about Data::Dumper as a development and debugging tool in the slightest. There it is very useful indeed.