I once implemented an Excel insurance rating and evaluation system (by company request) for a certain insurance company on the East Coast. This was an internship in...98? Not using VB at all, mainly hlookup() and vlookup() and many other stat functions. You could enter in rows upon rows of insurance tables and it would compare insurance risks versus various competitors, then generate graphs, win percentages, and summary data. I guess this is just saying that even with an abacus, great things are possible.
Given what I know now, this would have been a great place to write a custom Perl/Tk app instead, perhaps loading rules and datasets from YAML files versus the clumsy Excel format.
Heck, it really needed a database backend too!
Excel is decent for what it does, but storing 50 tables in a worksheet is just plain ugly. The worksheet grew to about 10 megs, a colleague developed a motorcycle version that was 25 MB! Anyhow, long story short, yes, it is all Turing Equivalent.
To the question posed at the top of the page, IMHO, programming is something you have to WANT to do. You don't need a problem in search of a solution, but rather, you just want to get under the hood and see what happens. I think there is a good reason, typically, why you don't see many marketing folks, etc, that like to code. It's puzzle-solving in a very pure form. In the case of Perl, it's puzzle solving combined with a very strange form of art.
| [reply] |
