I guess it all depends on your programming mentality. I've been at it for a while now (although not all Perl), and I have never been able to stand writing more than a few lines of code without checking that it works.

This is probably a personality thing - I just get really depressed if I can't see the results of my code running every half hour or so. I have this dread of writing some elaborate routine that takes ages to implement, and then discovering that I can't do it like that and having to scrap all that work. I have to say since I came to Perl that's happened a lot less :)

I also can't imagine coding without half a dozen help windows open showing the docs for the modules I'm using in my program. I do know people who like to do the whole program in one shot, then go back through and pick up the problems later. Personally, I can't stand debugging, so I do whatever I can to make sure I never have to do a huge debug session. I dread trawling through thousands of lines of code to find the bug.

Also, similar to the tip mentioned above, I usually have a window open to a program called test.pl, wherein I test anything that I'm not totally sure of. A lot of my program gets written in there, and then copied in to the body of the main bit when I'm totally sure it workd.

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.