While I have your attention, my “calculation” project that is getting a little beyond EXCEL’s abilities will eventually be turned into an online simulation for petroleum engineers and geologists (see http://davevolek.org/OilFinancier/index.html) to pit their economics skills against some AIs.

Based on my university days of APL and FORTRAN, I’m pretty sure I can learn to program the calculations myself.

Time increments in this simulation are the OF Day. Basically, an oil well will be up for auction each OF Day. The software generates some random parameters for that well. The player put a bid for that well against the eight AIs. The winning bid gets the oil well, which is put into the appropriate portfolio. The calculations for all portfolios is updated, which then means an OF day has passed. Another auction is set up.

Each portfolio for each OF day will have 100 to 200 datum.

So there is not a high level of interaction here. The player should be developing his/her own spreadsheets to determine an appropriate bid. Enter the numbers, the bid is displayed. The player enters the value. I estimate each OF day will take about two minutes in real time.

But the software will have to interface with the internet. So what language will be best for this application? I will likely hand off the HTML to someone else.