Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:11:06
Message-Id: 5bdc1c8b0906281011h713ba2fdo2b2972cc7d61619d@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly) by Roger Mason
1 On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Roger Mason<rmason@×××.ca> wrote:
2 > Mark,
3 >
4 > Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> writes:
5 >
6 >>    So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly
7 >> programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his
8 >> feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light -
9 >> performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under
10 >> Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever
11 >> become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app
12 >> that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20
13 >> databases I collect on Friday night.
14 >
15 > One possibility is R (http://www.r-project.org/).  It has very good
16 > graphing facilities, can access various database engines, is
17 > multi-platform and unless you process immense quantities of data, should
18 > be fast enough.  There may be people on the R mailing list doing the
19 > kind of thing that you want and there may be an add-on package that
20 > matches your needs (there are hundreds of add-ons).  Lightweight? No,
21 > but you don't need to learn all of it, just the bits relevant to your
22 > usage.  R is in portage.
23 >
24 > Another possibility is Root (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/) but it
25 > requires you to program in C++ (but there are Python and Ruby bindings)
26 > and is probably a steeper curve to ascend than R.  However, Root is
27 > capable of processing huge amounts of data quickly -- that is what it
28 > was designed for.  Anything you can do in R you can do in Root, but you
29 > will write more of the application yourself rather than using canned
30 > routines.  I have seen messages on the Root mailing list from people
31 > working with fiscal data.  Root is not lightweight, but is _is_ very
32 > powerful.  Root is in portage.
33 >
34 > I'm sure there are other very capable systems out there, these are two
35 > that I use (or have used).
36 >
37 > Cheers,
38 > Roger
39 >
40 >
41 Actually, I have R on one machine now. I haven't done much with it.
42 There's a good Google University YouTube statistics course you can
43 take online for free - was taught at Google, recorded an put on you
44 Tube, on data mining that uses R. I went through about 4 hours of that
45 but got distracted by life and didn't finish it.
46
47 R might be a good solution in that I could play on Linux but always be
48 able to go to windows if the need arose.
49
50 Thanks,
51 Mark