The warning against diving into a full-fledged programming language is a good one - most languages will overwhelm you with irrelevant minutiae on your way to simply doing what you want. That being said, if what you need is programming rather than drawing, take a look at the bottom of
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/TomAl...ting/Testing01 and my own flickr page at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/photona...7600280547434/ for some examples of easy 3-D programming of plots.
However, you may want to heed the suggestion to look at scientific visualization or plotting packages, or even drawing tools - maybe something like PovRay? See
http://hof.povray.org/Villarceau_Circles-CSG.html for an example of using this for a mathematically-oriented 3-D picture. Also, if it is amenable to drawing rather than plotting, there are numerous groups on flickr where people demonstrate their use of various tools: take a look at the question "what software do you use?" at
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cgart/ .
On the idea of having someone help with your data, do you have a small sample of it you'd feel comfortable sharing? Perhaps, if it is mathematically oriented and you can state your objective clearly, I could do something for you.