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. Thanks in advance! Cheers, Mark
