Re: Industry Specific Uses of Perl

Browsing through the various modules on CPAN will get you already a (non quantitative) idea of the areas where Perl is used.

But many industries use the generally applicable basic elements of Perl, such as DBI/DBD, web-frameworks, (language) parsing techniques, regular expressions, text munging, glue, ....

To give but one example: I work in insurance broking and I use Perl to maintain the database of the insurance claims of our clients; to parse the various data-formats in use by the insurers; to make automatic reports (through LaTeX, useing Perl as a glue language) and to run various kinds of statistics on the claims database for risk management purposes. And then I am forgetting about the countless little "one off" scripts to do all kind of things which would be tedious or difficult or error prone to do by hand.

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

Comment on Re: Industry Specific Uses of Perl

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Re^2: Industry Specific Uses of Perl by Anonymous Monk on Jul 16, 2015 at 15:10 UTC
</Could you please explain clearly, where we use Perl in Insurance domain(I mean What kind of work you automate in insurance domain)>	[reply]
Re^3: Industry Specific Uses of Perl by CountZero (Bishop) on Jul 17, 2015 at 06:24 UTC
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 My blog: Imperial Deltronics	[reply]