On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:09 AM, pk<[email protected]> wrote: > 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...
I haven't looked at Octave. I was thinking I should program a stand alone app and not really use an existing app. It's jsut where my head was. > >> 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... > No offense taken. All the trading is done on the Windows platform using proprietary trading platform apps. All the datafiles are therefore sitting in Windows and it just seems easier to just run a small app of my own there. I sometimes travel but still need to trade so my laptop would be running Windows at that time. I'd rather do my learning in the Linux environment. Less risk I'll blow away my whole machines, etc., and generally a nicer group of people cannot be found. :-) - Mark
