It's like writing Perl programs without ever using hashes: it is certainly possible, but why forgo the benefits of such a powerful tool?

Because some people find they get more benefit using other techniques. See Are debuggers good? for a long vitriolic thread on this very topic :-)

For example I personally find doing TDD a far more effective use of my time than spending time in the debugger. The mere fact that I need to drop into the debugger is a sign that I've fouled up earlier since I've obviously written code that is too hard for me to understand. The incidence of me using the debugger on my own code is as close to zero as makes no difference.

About the only time I use the debugger now is when poking at other peoples code and doing exploratory testing, or maybe trying out a one liner.

In reply to Re^3: Interactive scripting with DB by adrianh
in thread Interactive scripting with debugger by tlm

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.