From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([208.92.234.80] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1MKyWO-00051U-PG for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:50:34 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id B6420E07C6; Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:50:30 +0000 (UTC) Received: from rabble.robbieab.com (rabble.robbieab.com [213.79.38.74]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6163FE07C6 for ; Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:50:30 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [192.168.1.72] by rabble.robbieab.com with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1MKyWL-0004yK-GH for gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org; Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:50:29 +0100 Message-ID: <4A47AD64.3090604@robbieab.com> Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:50:28 +0100 From: Robert Bridge User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (X11/20090302) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly) References: <5bdc1c8b0906280934j524686d7ic25fb0ce352aacec@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <5bdc1c8b0906280934j524686d7ic25fb0ce352aacec@mail.gmail.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.7 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: cf9250ef-a001-4249-8d20-55eeab38cfa3 X-Archives-Hash: 26577d5f40ca1c60ebbb9993c2160ae1 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mark Knecht wrote: > 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. #friendly-coders on freenode is full of friendly people. Depending on how much effort you are willing to put in, I would probably suggest looking at some form of macro set for a spreadsheet (Excel and OO Calc both use basic variants, Gnumeric has a python interpreter.) Another possibility if you don't need much interactivity on the GUI would be to create a script + C-mini-app using GnuPlot to generate your graphs. Just a few thoughts... Rob. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkpHrWMACgkQZr0UhZgPVmyffgCg97gheECMbXqdhH640aGkxuWM fjoAoOwNt9vD+uNIt/iENZ0svkSR6B+4 =I+WH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----