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Mark Knecht wrote: |
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> These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have |
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> data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make |
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> decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting |
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> Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. |
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> The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, |
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> manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. |
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> This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started |
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> to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not |
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> generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small |
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> charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C & Pascal, but haven't programmed |
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> in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. |
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Have you looked at using Octave? It's a Matlab clone (and thus very |
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C-like), can output to Gnuplot and you can also create filters of your |
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own and output to Graphviz. The language R can perhaps also be of use, |
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depending on what you wish to accomplish... |
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> So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly |
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> programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his |
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> feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - |
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> performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under |
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> Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever |
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> become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app |
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> that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 |
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> databases I collect on Friday night. |
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Why Windows? I'm merely curious, not trying to criticize... |
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Best regards |
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Peter K |
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