Mark, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> writes:
> 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. One possibility is R (http://www.r-project.org/). It has very good graphing facilities, can access various database engines, is multi-platform and unless you process immense quantities of data, should be fast enough. There may be people on the R mailing list doing the kind of thing that you want and there may be an add-on package that matches your needs (there are hundreds of add-ons). Lightweight? No, but you don't need to learn all of it, just the bits relevant to your usage. R is in portage. Another possibility is Root (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/) but it requires you to program in C++ (but there are Python and Ruby bindings) and is probably a steeper curve to ascend than R. However, Root is capable of processing huge amounts of data quickly -- that is what it was designed for. Anything you can do in R you can do in Root, but you will write more of the application yourself rather than using canned routines. I have seen messages on the Root mailing list from people working with fiscal data. Root is not lightweight, but is _is_ very powerful. Root is in portage. I'm sure there are other very capable systems out there, these are two that I use (or have used). Cheers, Roger
