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On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Robert Bridge<robert@××××××××.com> wrote: |
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> Mark Knecht wrote: |
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>> Hi, |
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>> I know this is WAY off topic for this list but there's a lot of |
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>> smart, experienced people here so I figured I'd look for a little |
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>> guidance and then possibly join another email list that's more |
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>> appropriate. |
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>> |
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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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>> |
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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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>> |
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>> If you can recommend a good list or forum for silly folks like me - |
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>> know nothing about programming and have to ask lots os stupid beginner |
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>> questions - I'd greatly appreciate that also. |
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> |
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> #friendly-coders on freenode is full of friendly people. |
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> |
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> Depending on how much effort you are willing to put in, I would probably |
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> suggest looking at some form of macro set for a spreadsheet (Excel and |
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> OO Calc both use basic variants, Gnumeric has a python interpreter.) |
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> |
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> Another possibility if you don't need much interactivity on the GUI |
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> would be to create a script + C-mini-app using GnuPlot to generate your |
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> graphs. |
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> |
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> Just a few thoughts... |
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> Rob. |
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> |
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> |
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Actually I'm liking the suggest to try using R. I have already managed |
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to read my data files using the read.csv function. When I understand |
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headers and tables better I'll likely be able to make my plots from |
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that data pretty easily. It's cross platform so it solves that problem |
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and keeps me focused on where I might add value - evaluating the |
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market data - and not worrying about how to program in C or Python. |
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Open to other ideas but this one is looking pretty good to me so far. |
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Thanks, |
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Mark |
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