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Comment by monk_e_boy | Hacker News Reader

    > debug tools are not a priority, and you want to be able to hire fast and cheap: PHP.

The only debug tools that we found that were better than XDebug or NuSphere were Studio And C#. Perl, Python and Ruby were all a bit rubbish in comparison.

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I can't compare to the tools you mentioned since I haven't done much PHP in the last 10 years, but for Perl, I would strongly recommend you check out the following (Most are from the CPAN):

  * For a graphical IDE: Komodo or Padre or Eclipse with EPIC (great debugger support in those, since Perl 5's built-in debugger is pretty old-skool, requiring significant skill and experience to use effectively)
  * For code quality/standards static analysis: Perl::Critic
  * For performance profiling: Devel::NYTProf (seriously one of the best profilers I've used in any language)
  * For test coverage analysis: Devel::Cover
  * For benchmarking: Benchmark (core module) and friends
  * A REPL: Devel::REPL or Reply
  * On-demand debugging: Enbugger and Devel::Trepan
  * Unit testing: Test::More (and there are many, many other Test::* modules for anything you can think of that use the same general testing framework as the basic Test module that comes with Perl 5)

And there are so very many others out there that to mention them all would take all day, but these are the ones I use and like the most. Of course, others may have their own preferences and I'm sure there's even better stuff I haven't yet discovered TIMTOWTDI and all

I had a quick squizz at XDebug, and I'll try to remember it's existence next time I need to do some php debugging. On the other hand it looks quite high friction what with the extra config required.

For the normal use case I use `perl -d myscript.pl` as my goto debug tool, and I use the amazing test infrastructure to try to ensure that I'm debugging tests rather than interactive code. For web front end interactions I'm usually looking at:

    perl -d `which plackup` dev_server.psgi

Usually using LWP::Protocol::PSGI to get that server process management running inside my test.

For old codebases that have never run aside from inside apache, usually it's a matter of up to a day to decouple from the web server, although botched incrementally accreted mod_perl codebases can be much harder to tame (couple of months).

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