Well, I've been doing vi and shell for a long time, and the way I do it is (from command mode):

:!perl -d %

At least then you drop right to the debugger. Vim will give you a "press return" prompt when your program is done so you don't pop right back into the editor without seeing results.

If you keep having to go into the debugger, try putting the -d on the #! line and then just:

:!%