On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Robert Bridge<rob...@robbieab.com> wrote: > -----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----- > >
Actually I'm liking the suggest to try using R. I have already managed to read my data files using the read.csv function. When I understand headers and tables better I'll likely be able to make my plots from that data pretty easily. It's cross platform so it solves that problem and keeps me focused on where I might add value - evaluating the market data - and not worrying about how to program in C or Python. Open to other ideas but this one is looking pretty good to me so far. Thanks, Mark
