Nowadays, there are many good options for learning to program trading indicators. TradeLinks is a bit bare. I haven't used OpenQuant, but it looks good. Personally, I like NinjaTrader. Many people find Excel has everything they really need. If you goal is more curiosity than delivery, then rest your troubled mind, there is a high degree of general programming knowledge transfer between the available venues. There are even affordable classes in your local community education program. Good Luck with the adventure. Steven Davis
I use Excel as my front-end to display EVERYTHING... And set parameters for the underlying systems. You can even offload maybe 50% of calculations. It's not nearly as good as a custom front end... But it's a very easy solution where latency not big issue.