Programming Language for advanced Automation

Post Reply
User avatar
HRacing
Posts: 278
Joined: Tue May 14, 2013 11:25 am

Cheers PeterLe, Iv always wanted to learn a programming language even if not to use with betfair but purely for the fact that it interests me :). How this is then implemented into a auto stratergy im not sure but I will be on the look out for a programmer to test the water for sure. Just seen your post pop up Linus. Would you say as much can be achieved with C# as Python?
foxwood
Posts: 390
Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2012 2:54 pm

For a noob, I'd say Visual Basic is the way to go. You already have a handle on VBA (and therefore objects) so switching between VBA and VB.NET is straightforward. This gives you the skill set for automating using the BA / Excel connection and for writing your own "deeper" standalone programs in vb.net.

Note that you are not restricted to only using vb libraries just because you program in vb - with a bit of easy tinkering you can link with Windows libraries or .NET assemblies written in any language if they provide useful functionality. Also, you can call .net libraries from Excel VBA so you can have your own library available in both Excel and standalone programs.

As a long-in-the-tooth programmer, I only use vb.net for trading and even run it live in Debug mode rather than Release - nothing I do is seriously time critical so I take the easiest route I can.

For serious time critical stuff I would use assembler and/or C with C++ as the next "slower" step and any of the .NET languages as the slowest. The joy these days is that you can mix and match languages and objects easily whereas once upon a time you'd be stuck with the lowest common denominator that the project demanded.
User avatar
ShaunWhite
Posts: 9731
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

HRacing wrote:
Tue May 30, 2017 2:22 pm
Thanks for your thoughts, VBA has been more than helpful in a few projects for me but just wondered what the 'pro's' were using as there way of automation.
There's some extremely complex systems out there in VB land, don't underestimate it. The sort of coding you're looking to do won't tax any language.

Different people take to different things, so perhaps you could draw up your shortlist, spend an hour looking/reading about each, and see which one clicks. I'd say at this stage you almost can't go wrong, because anything you learn will transfer to other languages. The difference between programming languages is more like the difference between Spanish and Italian rather than the difference between Greek and Manderin.
User avatar
HRacing
Posts: 278
Joined: Tue May 14, 2013 11:25 am

Cheers for all the advice guys
LinusP
Posts: 1871
Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

Python is a high level language built on top of C, with that you get simplicity (no pointers / garbage collection) but you lose speed. C# is slightly lower giving you greater control but added complexity. As mentioned above do some reading, stack overflow recently did a survey on what is popular / liked, anything with visual in the title tends to be at the bottom...
Post Reply

Return to “Betfair Exchange API”