Thanks organofcorti, I'm reading up about it now. I've been programming for a little while but have never heard of R, even for statistical analysis. How come it isnt more mainstream? I've heard of languages such as K and Q which seems to be used fairly widely for banks processing tick by tick data however trading strategies tend to be predominantly done in C.
Do you have an overview of the pros/cons of R, and how it compares to the others. I wanna get a bit more of an idea what the language is like before investing serious time into learning it.
Can it interface easily with PHP and/or the existing API's to automatically place trades?
I'm not a good person to ask. Apart from R I've done a little C, python, and basic and that's about it (I can feel my kudos disappear as I write
shudder). But I like R, it's extensible, flexible, has error messages that actually help you find bugs, and can do everything I need it to. I've scraped webpages with it, and stochastic wrote some code that interfaces with bitcoinica (posted
here.
Another good upside is that it's been around in one form or another for decades. There's not one question I've had that couldn't be answered by google.
The downside is that it is very specialised. It's an object oriented math language, like matlab (only better) or mathematica (but open source and not quite as good). How much that will affect you I can't tell since I've never written an active tradebot, just the algorithms (they've done well, but I didn't power bots with them since they only traded on a week or month scale). Stochastic shows how it's done, though.
