I have been recently thinking of a small experimental software project of my own - mainly to satisfy my learning craving rather than out of any need. I have some experience programming VBA in MS Access 2003, but it does not really fit my learning objectives.
Even though I call it a project, I am still at the conceptual level, and also have no experience whatsoever doing any programming in any language under Linux.
I need your advice on what software tools I should look at (and eventually use) in order to design a simple application that could do some qualitative text analysis - like simple content analysis (word counting, meanings, dictionaries). I would like to use mysql as a backend for any textual data, and also want this application to be a graphical one, preferably KDE, but for the sake of learning I might consider GTK too.
So my question is - what development environment could I set up (I do not think that learning C or Java is an option) and how do I start with development in Linux? I’d greatly appreciate any hints or tips.
Also, is Python a good choice for text analysis? I would much rather learn that than anything else, but I am of course open to your suggestion and advice.
Thanks for your response! However, I am not sure KDevelop works with KDE4 yet (at least the stable version). I would much rather prefer something non-KDE3 anymore.
Has anyone tried or would anyone recommend Gambas?
One other thing I have not been able to understand is the programming language of Mono - is that only C, or could I expect something like Visual Basic?
If you wanted to develop for KDE 4, you might want to install qdevelop. I have used it a couple times and it works fine for KDE 4 applications.
On the other hand, and depending on how much time you want to spend learning, starting up with plain text files is a good start point to me, like you will not need IDEs and you learn much more.
The IDE is not really troubles me. What I really like about an IDE is the debugging ability as I go through the code and explore it.
However, I have not worked with plain compilers since the age of 80386 computers, and even then I was learning Borland Pascal within the text IDE… Maybe you mean I should try using python from the command line as I learn the language. I’d absolutely agree.
On the other hand, for Python development, how good an IDE is Eric?
hermesrules wrote:
> The IDE is not really troubles me. What I really like about an IDE is
> the debugging ability as I go through the code and explore it.
>
> However, I have not worked with plain compilers since the age of 80386
> computers, and even then I was learning Borland Pascal within the text
> IDE… Maybe you mean I should try using python from the command line as
> I learn the language. I’d absolutely agree.
>
> On the other hand, for Python development, how good an IDE is Eric?
Dunno.
Try it out, and compare it to e.g. Wingide 101 or personal.
But the choice for Python is a good one without question. Python has all the
bindings (modules)for GUI, database, text parsing and much more, and with
its powerful and compact syntax you’ll soon be able to develop very versatile
and amazingly small programs for big tasks.