Yeah, I don't use the Perl debugger much myself, almost always finding a mixture of reasoning, "-w", and print statements more efficient. Better still, once you're proficient at this kind of debugging, you can apply it to any language that has "print" (i.e. almost everything but Haskell ;), no matter how poor its tool support.
I have seen many CS majors who should have gone to vocational institutions or to a merlyn course, they would have learned more.
I'm partly responsible for producing some of those, it shames me to admit... Sadly, as long as CS (programming, really...) is seen as lucrative, and a CS degree as one of its prerequisites, this is the way things will be. For whatever reason, vocational education is socially stigmatized here in the states.