Year end reports

[Jason Kivlighn]

Terry Therneau wrote:
>  >I'll point out that even though 80% of GnuCash is C (and Gtk), and really
>  >the only parts of GnuCash still in Scheme are the QIF Importer and Reports,
>  >I think that "Scheme" is a Red Herring in terms of lack of developers.
>  >There's plenty to do for a developer who doesn't know Scheme and doesn't
>  >want to learn Scheme.  But people aren't chomping at the bit to send in
>  >code changes.
>  >
>  >Personally I think that most people just don't consider a finance application
>  >"Sexy".  I dont think that language has anything to do with it.
>  >
>  >-derek
>  >
>
>   Thanks Derek for the answers to my questions.
>   
>   With respect to your remark above:  I take your point.  Since I don't have 
> anything complex in my accounts (stocks, auto bank feeds, ...) the gnucash core 
> works very well for me, and so my attention had been focused on the report 
> aspect.  I've also never been excited by the "fancy input screens" problem, so 
> never learned Gtk or Tcl or etc.
As a long-time user of Gnucash for my personal finances, I'd just like
to throw in my 2 cents.  For many years I've been satisfied with
Gnucash's capabilities.  The one thing I've really been waiting for,
though, is the ability to easily create custom reports.  Even though my
experience with Scheme is limited to one course at the University of
Washington, what I feel has been the largest barrier to me writing
reports is a lack of API documentation (I'd love Python bindings, but I
understand Derek's point).  It took several hours to write less than a
dozen lines of code that adds a "Change" field to the Advanced
Portfolio, and I still don't feel like I understand my use of the gnc
API.  A complete online API documentation would work wonders for me.

I'll leave it to those who would actually do the implementation to
debate language choice, modularity, output format, etc.  I want to be
clear that I'm not making demands to the  (awesome) gnc developers, I
just want to provide some user feedback.

Cheers!
Jason