title: Plotting Lists in Python
body: <p>I'm trying to make a Plot of two lists, once shall have the time measured with timeit and the other the amount of times i ran through the loop. I only get an empty plot so i figured that something is wrong. Could somebody perhaps tell me where the mistake is?
  The functions are not really important but I will post the whole thing to provide context.
  Here is the code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import random
  import timeit
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  
  def generateSequences(n):
  
      RandomSequences = []
      dna = ["A","G","C","T"]
      for i in range(int(n)):
  
          randseq=''
  
          for i in range(50):
              randseq+=random.choice(dna)
  
          RandomSequences.append(randseq)
  
      return RandomSequences
  
  def generatePrefixes(p, RandomSequences):
  
      First20Chars = [x[:20] for x in RandomSequences]
      RandomChoices = []
      for i in range(p):
          randomPrefix = random.choice(First20Chars)
          RandomChoices.append(randomPrefix)
  
      return First20Chars, RandomChoices
  
  def searchReadsInList(RandomSequences, RandomChoices):
  
      start_time = timeit.default_timer()
      Matches_RS_RC = []
      for i in RandomChoices:
          for j in RandomSequences:
              if i in j:
                  Matches_RS_RC.append(j)
      elapsed_sRL = timeit.default_timer() - start_time
      return Matches_RS_RC, elapsed_sRL
  
  
  
  if __name__ == "__main__":
      count = 10
      while count &lt; 1000:
          RandomSequences = generateSequences(count)
          First20Chars, RandomChoices = generatePrefixes(5, RandomSequences)
          Matches_RS_RC, elapsed_sRL = searchReadsInList(RandomSequences, RandomChoices)
          ListCounts = []
          ListCounts.append(count)
          ListTime = []
          ListTime.append(elapsed_sRL)
          count = count + 10
  
      plt.plot(ListTime, count)
      plt.xlabel('Time')
      plt.ylabel('# of Reads')
      plt.savefig("TimePlot.pdf")
      plt.show()
  </code></pre>