What language to use for Project

Community Careers, Journeys, and Stories
1

-Current problem
Currently I have a massive excel sheet that records data(i have a restaurant)
It calculates tips dispersion(the rate changes from day to day), how much money is in our 2 safes, and calculates every 2 weeks how much each person made(for tax reasons). At the end of the day, if numbers dont add up to the total numbers given to us by the POS(our computer that you ring food in), it must be easy for the managers to go back and re-check each persons information. Now there a lot of other factors and exceptions that i will need to deal with, but for the bulk of the program, these are what i need. Store data, access data, and manipulate data. I would like to put some Passwords in there as well. Shift times for bartenders , bussers, and hosts need to be put in.

-who uses it.
I have the excel sheet on google drive, and my accountant looks at it every 2 weeks(off site). My 3 managers putting the information into the sheet are not tech savey, so it needs to be idiot proof. (right now they are dragging cells, and because i daisy chained the info, everything is getting messed up), and they are deleting things they are not supposed too…

Goals:
Now i have to save all the data every 2 weeks, go back in time and change information, and make it super easy to use. with the excel sheet i have lots of drop down menus… and I would love it if it saved data often. The excel sheet keeps losing information.

-Phases
I would like to eventually open more then 1 restaurant, and if that is the case, I would like to access the data from both restaurants.

-My experience
I have dabbled in C++ (forced to use in my classes), but that language is very rough(overflow errors, going over stack, etc), and I don’t think it’s the best language to work with nowadays. Now, i am willing to put in the time to learn a new language, but there are so many languages out there now that i can use and i’m super confused. I know a good programmer can knock this out in a week, but if you don’t learn, you don’t grow, so whats the point then?

thank you for any guidance,

PC

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If it’s excel as in microsoft’s product, then the answer is almost certainly C#

And, yes, indeed, C++ is not something you ever want to use unless you specifically need low level control and/or real time speeds

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  1. My Friend who programs in Java said to use Java.
  2. My friend who programs in javascript/HTML said its the “future”
  3. My friend who programs for a non profit said to use python…
  4. and now i get C#.

I was so confused when i got 3 different answers, that i was hopping, i could clear thing up on this site, but now i got 4 answers, from 4 people…

So what i am getting from this, is that there is no real bad language(other then C++)? Could you rate them, in your opinion? I numbered them 1-4 to make it easier… :-/

Python is probably the easiest to learn, Java is most widely used, and Javascript is the future… and C# is (i’m assuming) most similar to C++…

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Oh, also, i don’t mind starting from scratch and not using excel. I just understood why you said C#

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Because it’s in the same ecosystem as excel, if you’re going to interact with microsoft’s products then using their language will be a large advantage

If it’s not excel but something equivalent, then C# immediately has no advantage over anything else and you would instead pick whatever you know and/or has good libraries for what you want to do

You wouldn’t pick a language for the language, not in this case anyway. And if it isn’t going to live in a browser then, no, you wouldn’t go with javascript

And, no there’s no rating them, they do different things so depending on what you’re doing (and other factors, like what you know and what others know) you’d rate them differently

If it doesn’t really have anything to do with excel then yes drop it like a hot rock, put your data in a database (pretty much all big languages have excellent support for many databases) and if you were to make some kind of report you’d have a separate tool that gets its information from the database (the one source of truth and consistency of your data) and massage it into whatever format you want, similarly any potential web interface would be getting its information from that database

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So what I understood is that you need some graphic user interface that can handle data manipulation and store them in some friendly way (like Excel spreadsheet). Well you need to define where you want to store them in order to code the program as @ionatan stated above, you wanna make it web using some SQL database? Then you could go with Javascript or PHP.

If you want it like a common software, you could go with Java which has plenty number of tutorials for making your own program and is more comfortable for the programmer than making one on Python. However, my experience with Python has taught me the beautiful use of Pandas Package in order to handle Excel spreadsheets. But as I stated above, Python GUI is a bit harder and could take some time to get the desired result. So it is up to you to pick the right choice.

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7

It sounds like you need to use a language to manipulate a CSV file
Take the language you are most comfortable in and look up how to manipulate CSV files.

I’ve used C++ to do this a ton. I think you have some misconceptions about C++. However, in this case Python has excellent tools to manipulate CSV files with ease

You are looking for a program that isn’t performance critical but is easy to write and maintain.
Use Python imo