[lmiller1990]

I work on a similarly nightmare-ish Perl codebase, that makes use of Moose and MooseX (and all the other various plugins people have made), along with various hacks Perl and Catalyst hacks only lifelong Perl monks can understand. The only way to figure out anything is `Pry` and `Data::Dumper` everywhere. Perl critic also conflicts with some of the other libraries in the ecosystem, like the one that provides `method` and `func` (not sure which one it is).

Perl is great for text manipulation and one offs, not large, production systems.

[mst]

You might find the Dwarn command available from http://p3rl.org/Devel::Dwarn (original) and http://p3rl.org/Devel::DDCWarn (newer version with extra-compact output) helpful - it lets you change e.g.

    return $foo->bar->baz;

to

    return Dwarn $foo->bar->baz;

which will 'warn' out the dumped structure and then return it, so you can instrument code for debugging trivially.

DDCWarn also provides a DwarnT so you can add a tag that gets printed but not returned, i.e.

    return DwarnT TAG_NAME => $foo->bar->baz;

There's not really a book on Moose, but the Moose::Manual pages plus Modern Perl plus The Definitive Guide to Catalyst work out pretty well between them for bringing people up to speed.

[petre]

We use Mojolicious specifically in order to avoid needless complexity inferred by Catalyst. Perl is ok for small to medium production systems but library support is quite lacking for 2020. We'd probably use something else if we had to start fresh today.