google finance - what type of development/lang go into building the site?

Question

I'd like to get into financial programming?, if thats even the correct term. I love the usability of Google finance. What should I learn to get me started on that path.

Answer 1

You need to know how to program.

You also need to understand finance terms: so accounting, finance, economic, and math classes would be helpful.

You also need to pick a focus, maybe not the first day, but have a goal in mind: do you want to make stock-tracking and -predicting tools? Learn how the stock market works, gather historical data, etc.

Answer 2

1. HTML/CSS, Javascript + Flash/Silverlight - anything that would allow you to build RIA (for the client side data presentation and UI); C++/Java/C# (for the server side data processing)
2. Signal processing (for plotting, scaling, trends calculation and other general processing of the stock data)
3. Statistics (for calculating averages, moving averages and other statistical processing of the stock history)
4. Technical Analysis (for figuring out what tools and data traders want and how they want the data presented)
5. Hosting, deployment, scalability and reliability basics and principles.
6. Software processes - scrum, continuous integration, test-driven development (for managing your development process and delivering quality software on schedule)

Answer 3

Google Finance is just a web app - you could use pretty much any language to build it. The charts are done in Flash (but could likely be done in Silverlight or a CANVAS element), but everything else is just server-side generated HTML and AJAX.