The two main applications I have written are the following:
- Our office works with many different insurance companies. All these companies produce lists of claims of our clients. Unfortunately all use a different file format, such as CSV, spreadsheets, RTF, ... As you can see, that makes analysing these claims lists quite difficult. Hence the scripts I have written will parse these lists and extract the data into a common database. Analysing the claims data then becomes a (relatively) easy job with DBI and some SQL. The data from this database is then transformed into a format that is easy to use with, for instance, R.
- Another project is to produce standard Insurance Certificates on basis of data which our commercial people maintain in (mainly) some excel-spreadsheets. "Standard documents" of course scream "template"! Indeed Template::Toolkit is the central pivot for this script. It is a rather straigth-forward "extract data from spreadsheet; put into a Perl-datastructure; run the template engine" application, but my colleagues think it is kind of magical. In goes a few spreadsheets and out comes a nicely formated PDF-file. The template produces a LaTeX-file which is passed to (La)TeX to make the finished pdf file. Of course, Perl drives this whole process from start to finish, leveraging disparate technologies into one seamless whole. Perl is the best glue ever!.
CountZero
A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James
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Imperial Deltronics