Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[Roger Mason]

Mark,

Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> 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