How does one program pic related?

learn java or C#

If you just need it for yourself you should use Mathematica.

To get it interactive would be quite hard, but modeling the graph from data (lets say on a .txt file) is quite simple.

Use python, due to the fact that it is easy to learn, fast to develop, and has many modules.

A good module that I've used to plot data would be matplotlib. You can make several data representations with it, however if i remember correctly the module requires 1 or 2 other modules as dependencies. Most likely these are either scipy or numpy, I forget.

was gonna say this

JS
flot

i fucking hate JS, but it seriously is the shit for this kind of interface. flot is interactive as well. you'll have your first plots in minutes if you use the examples and you'll quite easily be able to understand what's going on as well. matplotlib, imho, will take longer.

to serve requests, use python + flask, nginx at the backend. this will take a bit longer to set up, if you already have the hosting plus url, plan about a day.

if you need it just for yourself, matlab should do the trick though (don't know about mathematica, rarely ever used it, but should work too).

I actually do this as my job as a software dev. Are you trying to build an application just for yourself or multiple users? My personal recommendation would be to render the data in a web browser because of how many great JS libraries are out there for data visualization. Check out:

>d3js.org/
>flotcharts.org/
>morrisjs.github.io/morris.js/
>zingchart.com/

I've used all of these, but there are a ton more out there. The downside to building a web application is that it's gonna require more work, but thankfully frameworks like Django (Python), Rails (Ruby), and Laravel (PHP) will make your life easier. Django might be a good choice as backend framework since Python is good for number crunching (scipy, numpy), plus it is an easy language to pick up. However if you are just trying to mess around or are limited in programming knowledge, what I'm suggesting is probably complete overkill.

ah yeah, i forgot about plot.ly. check that out, it might do what you're looking for already. also interactive, loads files from dropboxes n shit. hinge to pretty much any backend you want, language wise.

flot is imho the easiest to start with. zero learning curve even if you know zero JS. also not as flexible compared to the others, but that seems secondary to me.

i disagree on the Django/Rails part. they're both monsters to get up and running, whereas flask/sinatra are just a breeze to work with. Laravel i know nothing about, i despise PHP (which is stupid, i know, but i can't help it).

Yeah Rails has way too much bloat, scaffolding and the whole RESTful approach is overkill in many cases. Django, from my experience, is incredibly simple to set up and custimizable. Plus you get a nice ORM, templating language, etc. Definitely not as lightweight as Flask (which I know almost nothing about), but you can start rendering dynamic html in no time.

flask is essentially like sinatra. you should really check it out... flask.pocoo.org/ ... the landing page has the hello world, html rendering is not far from this.
it also comes with a templating language, jinja. which is awesome, since you can use it for other ascii stuff as well; i'm using it in a project generating latex files right now.

i particularly like flask because i can just quickly glue simple browser interfaces to other projects i have, which is just great for so many reasons.

>I'd learn C if that's what I needed.

But you don't need C. Plotting data is a simple task and making it interactive is even simpler. The problem is that to set up the environment that would allow you to run this would be quite the challenge in C or C++ but if you did it in python or vb (the ones I recommended) then you could have it done with literally one line of code because those programming languages were designed for people like you who just care about accomplishing simple tasks.

OP here. I'm trying to make this for my own use. I have a method of interpreting data that seems to work well, but it takes me a very long time to do it myself. Therefore, I would like to personally program something that does all of what I would do *much* faster.
Currently, I'm programming in excel. I know pretty much nil about Java, but I would LOVE to learn and get fluent.
>However if you are just trying to mess around or are limited in programming knowledge, what I'm suggesting is probably complete overkill
I'll probably need that eventually. Again, I'd like to keep upgrading and improving a program to make better and better decisions, and hopefully teach it how to start improving itself...

>programming in excel

dude...

Excel is the shitstain on the professional world, seriously. its sheer abundance on every single computer at every single company on earth have led to a culture where asshole engineers write their shitty little microtools which are never robust, never scale, never age, yet they stick to excel/vba because it's "what i know" even though python and in someplaces R and matlab would be available through corporate IT as well. corporate IT, on the other hand, is largely degraded to making sure ms office runs.

so, while it is correct that it might be a bit overkill-y and you could probably do it in matlab (if you have a license or are willing to pirate it, you can try that), don't be a pussy. python interfaces with anything you could imagine, you can read excel files if that's what you want. build a small flask app - shouldn't be more than, say, 50 to 100 lines of code, i'm pretty sure you can do it in even less; stick some JS with flot in front of it - it's all templated, you can't really go wrong - and run that shit. you don't even need to configure a web server or any of that if you just need it locally.

to wit: NOT java. python+flask+flot are the three words you google.

now go and learn some coding.

Alright, Alright, holy crud. I'll learn Python. Going to start this afternoon.
Another question: is python idea fro the graphing process, or should Java be the grapher?

>(if you have a license or are willing to pirate it, you can try that)
as long as you only do basic stuff and dont need 3rd party libraries, octave will do just fine.

and if you do need 3rd party libraries, I wonder if python will cut it any better than octave

>So you are delusional enough to recommend a beginner who is only interested in doing some interactive plotting to do it in fucking C?
No, I'd recommend that OP learn a language designed around plotting and exploratory data analysis.

R.

you read and prepare data in python. also, you serve html/js with flask (which is a python web framework). the data is loaded by the JS (JavaScript - NOT Java, you do NOT need ANY Java for this) and rendered in the user's browser. interactivity is therefore created by the JavaScript plot - for which the formidable flotchart.org provides you with everything you need out of the box.

so, essentially, your process will look like this:
1. download flot and follow their guide. if you want a bit of simple html around your plot, check out bootstrap (you can just use one of their examples).
2. create the site in html+javascript using some dummy data you hardcode into it.
3. download python 3 from the website and install it (i'm assuming you're on windows).
4. go to the flask website (i linked it in a previous post) and download and install that; it should be something along the lines of "pip3 install flask" in a command window (enter cmd in the search bar of the start menu and hit enter).
4. find the instructions on how to render templates in the flask docs.
5. hack together a flask app that serves your html.
6. open your browser, enter localhost:5000 and enjoy.

i don't know about mathematica/octave. i was talking about matlab. i'm aware this is possible with mathematica/octave but i don't know how complex it is simply because i've never done it in there.

>visual basic
holy fuck hahaha

>it's either visual basic or fucking C!
holy shit you really are retarded

Anyway OP, JavaScript is the way to go, simply because of the amazing libraries that do this you want almost out of the box. All of the ones here are amazingly good. Javascript is a very easy language, python-like.

You could also use python, it has nice graphical interfaces I guess and is equally easy to use and powerful.

octave is "the same" as matlab
there are difference and 3rd party matlab stuff will likely not work in octave out-of-the-box, but octave is basically the GNU alternative to matlab.

so just pointing out that the price of matlab is only a valid concern if you have to use some 3rd party libraries (which to be fair comes up often enough)

i'm sorry, i thought octave is the mathematica-alternative, not the matlab one. messed it up. you're completely right then, octave would be a way to do this, absolutely.

python/flask at the backend, serving the data. js at the frontend, rendering it. this way OP can just define a directory to crawl for files and doesn't need a web server in between to get a stable working system.
yeah, i know, node.