-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mark Knecht wrote: > Hi, > I know this is WAY off topic for this list but there's a lot of > smart, experienced people here so I figured I'd look for a little > guidance and then possibly join another email list that's more > appropriate. > > These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have > data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make > decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting > Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. > The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, > manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. > This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started > to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not > generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small > charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C & Pascal, but haven't programmed > in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. > > So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly > programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his > feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - > performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under > Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever > become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app > that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 > databases I collect on Friday night. > > If you can recommend a good list or forum for silly folks like me - > know nothing about programming and have to ask lots os stupid beginner > questions - I'd greatly appreciate that also.
#friendly-coders on freenode is full of friendly people. Depending on how much effort you are willing to put in, I would probably suggest looking at some form of macro set for a spreadsheet (Excel and OO Calc both use basic variants, Gnumeric has a python interpreter.) Another possibility if you don't need much interactivity on the GUI would be to create a script + C-mini-app using GnuPlot to generate your graphs. Just a few thoughts... Rob. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkpHrWMACgkQZr0UhZgPVmyffgCg97gheECMbXqdhH640aGkxuWM fjoAoOwNt9vD+uNIt/iENZ0svkSR6B+4 =I+WH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
