[Coin-discuss] A little question

[Ran Naot]

Hello, 

My name is Ran and I stumble upon this amazing site just now. 
I am a student of industrial engineer in Israel and I am not familiar
with all the term and knowledge you present on this site.

Please excuse my stupid questions for my level as programming is low
and I never worked outside the windows base and java environment. I
know the theory pretty well, I have good modeling abilities but as a
programmer I am unexperienced.

I came to this site after I took on myself a Small assignment to solve
and program a Dynamic Programming problem using successive
approximation.

I never wrote a DP problem before and I thought to myself "why should
I do so?" The problem is pretty compound and it holds a DP within a
DP... If I am too blurry what I mean is that I have to call and use
the DP algorithm with different vars (same structure and functions) a
lot of times along the solution.

I thought I might find an application for windows that is free that
has an API that I can tap into so my algorithm will use it to solve
the simple DP problems I will sent to it. I have Lindo installed but
it didn't had a lot of data regarding it's DP abilities on the help
file.

I think I got into the right place, but seems like - all is for unix,
that the explanation and usage is for pro-programmers only and I
failed to understand if you have a DP solver on hand or not...

I myself never wrote Mathematical programming before - is it an hard
thing to do?
Should I know something unique about it before starting programming it?
can I use windows base java to call api's of programs written in other lang? 

I appreciate if you find the time to answer me, 
Anyhow seems like this site has a lot of knowledge to offer, 
I will be glad to share mine if needed, 
My main thees includes using a genetic algorithms to solve a np-hard
deterministic scheduling problem from large scales.

Thanks in advance, 
Ran Naot.