Preload Data::Printer and avoid polluting your code with debug symbols

When I work, I tend to have a lot of boilerplate. I am a great user of Data::Printer for debugging. There is no way I wouldn't use it, even on the smallest project. Usually, I have this on all my projects:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Printer;

p $object;

Fellow Peter coworker saw me doing that once and said I liked typing too much: only use DDP was enough.

Later I learned another solution was provided in the DDP documentation.

It's possible to call ::pinstead of p(): ::p doesn't require to use the module first.

use strict;
use warnings;

::p $object;

For getting this to work, it's necessary to preload the module through command line:

perl -MDDP script.pl

The good thing is that if we forget debug symbols in a module that is going to reach deployment pipelines or the CPAN (assuming we don't have other tools configured complaining about that), it will trigger a compile-time failure without the -M option, making it easier to catch.

Note that it also works well for tests with Test2::Harness:

yath -MDDP 01_test.t