How can I do a (short) Perl talk when my audience doesn't know Perl?

I'm planning out a 10-minute presentation to give in my databases class this week. My first thought was to talk about a DB object-persistence class I've been writing (It's similar to Class::DBI except simpler and more functional). However, given the exceedingly low time limit for the talk, and the unfamiliarity with Perl among the classmates, there is no time left to get people up to speed on the basics (Perl OOP, DBI.pm) during the presentation to talk about my favorite features of this module.

So I decided to change the focus and plan a presentation on Perl object persistence layers in general, showing only basic features and how easy they are. But even this looks like it may take more than 10 minutes: Perl OOP is not something I expect others to understand after just one slide. Also, how can you talk about dynamic accessors and mutators without explaining AUTOLOAD? I don't want to spend a lot of time on these concepts so that I can get to the real meat of my presentation, but on the other hand they are still very important and I don't want my audience to be drowning in Perl they don't understand.

I'm also unsure of the right amount of code examples in Perl to show. I don't want their unfamiliarity with the syntax to slow things down as well. C++ is the lowest common denominator at our school, so do I have to show translated C++ code to make it easily understandable? I fear doing this because I want to talk about Perl specifically, and how it makes things easy.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions! Cheers,

blokhead

In reply to Perl technical presentations by blokhead

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