What language To Use?

[annannienann]

Hello everyone, hope I have put this in the right place.

I will soon (July) be starting my Unit 6 Computer Science course work. Unit 6 involves finding a person that could benefit from having a custom written application. I have found such a person.

My client requires a stand alone application to run on a windows platform. The application will take a comma separated text file (ASCII) and preform vast amount of processing to the data in order to sort, find and correct the data. The application would then present the data it could not correct to the user to allow them to fix it and present the data it has fixed to check if it has done it correctly.

I was wounder what programming language you feel it would be best to complete this project with.

Thank you for your time. Peter Sutton

[RobSoftware]

The first thing that came to my mind was PHP but since you are in a Windows Environment and your users probably won't have PHP installed I would suggest a RAD (Rapid Application Development) language such as Visual Basic or C#.

If you use most other languages you would need to build your own GUI so give one of those a try or let some other people post here.

[annannienann]

I think you've hit the nail on the head there. I have been programing in Java now for some time and found the GUI side of the things very slow...very very slow.

I think I will use Visual Basic. I have done some limited program using VBA inside Excel. Is there any books/websites/ect... that you can recommend I use to get started? Also, can you recommend and IDE that would be good for me.

Thanks again. Peter Sutton.

[Jordan]

Visual Basic is a good language to create GUI based applications quickly although you loose a lot of power when you use it. I've found that most programming books are the same but there is one in the resource section under books:

CodeCall - Books

Edit: I'm moving this thread to the General Programming forum.

[DannyC]

I'd def. go for Visual Basic, its pretty efficient in creating a simple, but effective GUI for your app, and the coding side of things should be a breeze

[WingedPanther]

One issue with Visual Studio: if it's .NET, your client will need the run-time environment. Borland can give you similar functionality in Delphi or C++ without that overhead. If you're dealing with a LOT of data, you will also want to consider language efficiency and scalability. This can be especially important if you're looking at sorting data.

[annannienann]

I have decided to create it with Java because it turns out it needs to run on a number of OSs.

The application is required to process approx. 10,000 records containing 4 field each field must checked and if possible fixed.

[paddy3118]

I would dump the data from the spreadsheet as csv, use a scripting language to read the csv file, process it, and dump an output csv file. then read the csv file back into a spreadsheet.

You say that your solution must be cross platform, so you could use open office as the spreadsheet if it is portable across platforms - if not, then use different spreadsheets on different platforms. Write a spreadsheet macro to dump as csv, run the csv processing script and then load the resultant csv file.

I would write the csv processor in Python, it has an excellent csv reading/writing capability (I've even had it read correctly cells with newlines in them etc), Python runs on platforms from supercomputers to mobile phones, and has very few portability issues when doing this sort of task on Mac/Windows/Unix.

With the above flow, you would spend most of your time getting the calculations correct rather than on portability and GUI issues (the spreadsheet macro would handle data transfer and display).

- Paddy.

[DevilsCharm]

Since all these languages are being suggested, does that mean you have to know like seven languages to be involved in computer science?

[icepack]

it depends on how far you want to go. are you going to get a programming job if you only know C? probably not.

the computer science program here at ECU teaches you computer science, not a programming language.

plus, i would NOT learn Visual Basic, unless you are only into programming for fun and on the side.

it teaches you unsafe programming practices. it's the programming language for little kids who need their hands held.

C++ is a great beginning language by the way.