I definitely agree that you should take advantage of Perl's rich syntax, even though I lean towards a verbose code style myself. The main issue I had with your meditation was about constructor arguments, and that was already addressed by Moritz.

I'd still like to comment on the bit about debugging. I tend to shuffle any logic for debugging into a sub, and invoke that sub whenever I need something dumped:

# Skipping boilerplate pragmas ...

use constant DEBUG => 1;

sub debug {
    if (DEBUG) {
        say STDERR (ref $_[0]) ? Dumper $_[0] : $_[0];
    }
}


debug("Something is on fire");
debug([ qw(fire famine flood) ]);
[download]

This way I can easily change what I mean when I say debug - print to STDERR, log to a file, dump to a database, summon the remote controlled sky writing airplane, whatever. It's really just another opportunity to avoid copy and paste coding.