A lot of discussion has been given to marketing Perl better recently in light of its perceived unpopularity as a dynamic language relative to Python - for me one thing that's always stood out is the slightly-more-difficult process of testing small code concepts. With Perl it's often easier to just crank out a new test script, write it and run it - but I often just delete these later and rarely go back and look at them once I've grasped what I intended to.

If it's small enough I can use Perl's debugger (perl -de 1) in interactive mode, but this has several disadvantages to Python's shell:

• Line continuation must be done explicitly with \ (making it more tedious to copy-paste code)
• Typing a variable doesn't do anything - you have to know to type print first (or p if you've read the help). You also don't get the introspection Python gives for functions or objects.
• My Ubuntu Perl shell doesn't have readline support
• Having to explicitly turn on strict and warnings

Having said all this I echo much of this RFC request but still, to me this issue doesn't get enough attention in the discussion of the perception of poor Perl adoption - in addition to selfishly wanting what I can get in Python in my Perl coding tasks.

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