Re^2: I never use the debugger.

[Anonymous Monk]

The people have have tried to convince me to use one or another debugger are usually the sort that work on single scripts and modules from only CPAN (so they aren't debugging their own modules).

Odd. I found the perl debugger especially valuable for deciphering other people's modules, especially for bugs in CPAN modules.

For example, about four or five years ago, there was a bug in one of the PDF modules we were using; the author had clearly forgotten the /g modify on one of his regexps, so that only the first occurance of a given class of special characters was being properly escaped.

I didn't have to grasp the entire PDF specification, nor the author's intent in implementing that specification, in order to detect and correct the bug, because I had a nice debugger to guide me, and show me what was going on inside all the tricky objects and methods and twisty maze of function calls.

Especially with OO, where a function can return objects from different classes, each of which has their own special version of a method call, it's very nice to know exactly what function is being called, and which data is being passed, when all the code says is "call method X with object Y".