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

[pk <peterk2@coolmail.se>]

Mark Knecht wrote:

>    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.

Have you looked at using Octave? It's a Matlab clone (and thus very
C-like), can output to Gnuplot and you can also create filters of your
own and output to Graphviz. The language R can perhaps also be of use,
depending on what you wish to accomplish...

>    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.

Why Windows? I'm merely curious, not trying to criticize...

Best regards

Peter K