I'm always surprised when I hear someone's never used the Perl debugger. But then again, I wrote assembler on and off for the first eight years after I graduated from Waterloo, and the only reasonable way to debug assembler is with a debugger, single-stepping through to confirm what's happening is what you meant to happen. (First was 6809 and 68000 assembler, and after that, x86 assembler for DOS on the IBM PC, for TSRs and my own function library. Good times.)

As a bonus, perl -de 1 lets you try out *any* Perl code you want. You can even pull in modules you want to try out and write some code on the fly. But that's the way I work -- not everyone develops the same way.