This post explains the beginnings of my involvement with the Perl Tk debugger.

Origins

There are a number of well-known schisms in the world of computing:

Emacs vs Vi

Tabs vs Spaces

Perl vs Python

CLI vs GUI

Windows vs everything else

I’d like to add another one: Debuggers vs Print Statements.

I come down on the side of debuggers. I’m a visual person and I’m impatient. I don’t like to wait for results. I like to get in there, crawl around, change things, see what’s going on.

I first started using debuggers on Digital Equipment Corporation VAX machines running VMS . I moved to Unix and used gdb in Emacs and then found ddd . Any time I started with a new language, one of the first things I reached for was a visual debugger.

When I started using Perl in the waning years of the last century, I conducted my usual search and found Devel::ptkdb . It served me well for all the years in which my primary language was Perl. Now, it did have its quirks.…