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

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   I know this is WAY off topic for this list but there's a lot of
smart, experienced people here so I figured I'd look for a little
guidance and then possibly join another email list that's more
appropriate.

   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.

   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.

   If you can recommend a good list or forum for silly folks like me -
know nothing about programming and have to ask lots os stupid beginner
questions - I'd greatly appreciate that also.

   Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Mark