I know some people have waited a long time for this. Here's a quick blog post about how to sign up for a chance to participate in the closed alpha.

I've had a few discussions with people about why I wrote Keyword::DEVELOPMENT, a useful, but simple module. In short, it lets you do this:

use Keyword::DEVELOPMENT;

# later ...

sub consume_item ( $self, $item_slug ) {
    DEVELOPMENT {
      # expensive and time-consuming debugging code here
    }
    my $inventory = $self->inventory;
    return $self->new_exchange(
        slug => 'consume',
        Steps(
            Inventory(  $inventory => contains => $item           ),
            Consumable( $self      => consume  => 'item_instance' ),
            Inventory(  $inventory => remove   => 'item_instance' ),
        ),
    )->attempt;
}

The expensive debug block? With Keyword::DEVELOPMENT, is simply fails to exist in production unless the PERL_KEYWORD_DEVELOPMENT environment variable has a true value. Thus, there is no performance overhead to instrumenting your code with complicated debugging logic (as I'm currently doing with Tau Station).

It's been pointed out to me by several people that I can accomplish the above in regular Perl with constant folding. I'll explain what that means and why I prefer the keyword route.