Mark Knecht wrote: > 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.
Have you looked at using Octave? It's a Matlab clone (and thus very C-like), can output to Gnuplot and you can also create filters of your own and output to Graphviz. The language R can perhaps also be of use, depending on what you wish to accomplish... > 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. Why Windows? I'm merely curious, not trying to criticize... Best regards Peter K
