Somewhat to my own surprise, I’m at YAPC::Europe in Paris. I pitched up to the early birds session and offered a talk if they’d had any people pull out and it turned out that they had – Ronan Oger was due to give a half day tutorial on SVG-based GUIs on the first afternoon of the conference, but he wasn’t going to make it in time, so the organizers swapped his talk with Dave Cross’s talk on Tieing and Overloading Objects in Perl.

Dave’s talk is an hour shorter than Ronan’s, so Simon Wistow, Richard Clamp and me offered three 20 minute talks to fill the gaps.

There was a catch; all the talks I’d taken to America had been aimed at 40 minutes and for the life of me I couldn’t see how to make them any shorter.

“Never mind,” I thought, “I can waffle about Pixie or refactoring or something, or if all else fails I can brush off 12 Step Perl and get my audience to do at least half of the work for me.

This was my plan, but then I had this idea for a cunning trick to make Perl’s method inheritance system a little more sane.