Native LabVIEWers & Migrators

[Conseils]

And in the begining the Lord said "Let there be binary" and so there was binary and he saw it was good.....

Well that's how I started; literally with 0s and 1's into a core store via a punch tape. Some assembler followed mixed with wired logic accumulators, alu's, adders and stuff which later became known as computers. 

HEX programmed into bizarre systems built out of little 14 and 16 pin devices, memory spaced measured in bytes and clock speeds measured in the Kilo Hertz. Then followed BASIC (Hewlett Packard 9815,s Z80's, 6502's and some really obscure stuff) and FORTRAN in that order; odd but true. BBC Basic and Apple Basic, PSION OPL and more really obtuse stuff.

Fortunately at university it was PASCAL, a real compiler with monochrome text in the choice of your monitor phosphor, a parser with multiple passes, optimisation and technical stuff like that. Structure, black box approach, syntax diagrams, BNF. Then well it went down hill for a while with C, C++ and later finally at rock bottom Visual Basic and SQL. They really were dark days, marked with what one couldn't do rather than what could be done. Virtual programmable interrupt controllers, device driver hell, dll's and some stuff that it would be illegal and unkind to mention to youngsters .  Had it not been for the structure imposed at university I would have given it all up and taken up accountancy or booze or both.

On one of the darker days of C malloc and so on, a shaft of light came forth from the apostle director... he said "Worry not, there is another path my son and it is called LabVIEW....."

Well actually he said "I have been to the competition as they are buying the company and they are using LabVIEW and if you want to continue working, get with the programme; like now!!... training course {cold days in hell were mentioned}... ha, you must be joking right? .... there's a manual isn't there?" .  The quotes are true, actually he was an extremely good boss; thank god; I worked for him for a further 12 years or so (LabVIEW of course... 'don't say when but how high, SIR')!

LabVIEW versions since then..... X.XX   ohh and HTML, Javascript, ASP even more SQL Ahh almost forgot, strangely enough; a foreign language as well.

[Dennis_Knutson]

I learned Fortran in my last year of college. In 1975 or so, when I started working as a test engineer, I used a language called ATLAS. Coding sheets were turned over to keypunch operators that created a big stack of cards. The cards were then loaded into an IBM 370 mainframe that compiled it and created a mag tape that was loaded onto a TI micro-computer. It usually took days to find all of the mistakes in the punch cards before we could even start to debug the program. Around 1980 or so, the Commodore PET came out. This was a personal computer that came with a GPIB port. Wrote a lot of Basic programs for that and also did some C programming on a PDP-11. I bought version 1 of NI's LabWindows. Contrary to it's name, at this time, it was DOS only. When microsoft introduced Visual Basic, I started using that and thought this was really something else. Nice and easy user interface design. Not too long after that, the local NI Sales Engineer said, that since LabVIEW had been ported over to Windows, why not give that a try. Didn't really use it until version 3 was released but what a revelation. It was then, and remains the best way to program.

[RobCole]

Wow, suddenly I don't feel so old in here. 🙂

NOT a native LabVIEW programmer. I can go back to flipping toggle switches and hit the load button on a couple of systems. Punch cards were a step up. FortG, Fortran IV, Watbol, Assembly, BASIC, APL. I taught Pascal at a college for a short bit. I still have a copy of Apple Pascal at home (but no machine to run it on). I co-wrote what we called a "worm" program long before we'd heard the term Virus. All it did was speed up Apple DOS.

I've done some work in VB, but nothing that was completed. Took a course in C++.

I now do a lot of LabVIEW (since '92), but I'm learning C#. I'm always looking for something new to learn.

    Rob

[smercurio_fc]

Cool, another thread with free 5-stars!

I am not a native LabVIEW programmer, but close. Initial program was Pascal on Mac computers (back when their ROMs were coded in Pascal), and a little bit of assembly language and Fortran due to college courses. Then LabVIEW, starting with version 2.something. Since then it's been probably about 70% LabVIEW. The rest has been VB, SQL, ASP, C, C++, VB.NET, and C#.

[Ben]

I am a migrant as well starting out with toggle ins ( remeber the "I can write that code in 13 instructions." "I can .. 10 instructions" ... competion?) on Computer Automation naked mini's and used Debug via an ASR-33 Teletype (30 baud).

Switched jobs and sitll did adhoc toggle ins for PDP-11's ( 0102738 octal = move the data that follows this instruction to the address loacted in the next long word) but added DCL since the specailized analysis I needed wasn't available. The batch jobs had to run over night with the results being printed on green-bar paper the next morning. Taught myself VAX-macro to speed my applications and then added C to my arsenal so I could I could function as productively under Unix as VMS. (Anyone rember the NUXI story?).

I was latter directed by one of the PHD's I worked for at Pitt to use LabVIEW to implement one of his projects and was an istant convert. Since then I have only done enough C to get drivers working.  So I can say "I used to C, but I got better."

Ben

[Matthew_Williams]

Basic -> assembly (8080, z80, 6502, 6509, 80x86) -> Forth -> C -> LabVIEW.  Any other Forthers here see
LV as a truly graphical Forth?  To quote Steve Ciarcia, however, my favorite programming language is
still solder.  Can't do as much as quickly with solder, but once it is done (properly) it stays done no matter what
Microsoft does 😉

Matt

[devchander]

A Migrator

Started with C >> Took a break for some time and was toying around with BioMedical Hardware( absolutely no S/W programming) during that period >> Then onwards, been faithful to LabVIEW for the past five years

ciao,

Dev

[Robst]

Well, I have to confess that I'm not a native LV Programmer.

I have CS formation so I've tried a variety of languages. As I programmer I was born in college using C, with the typical "Hello Word" program, then I learned C++, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and then I programmed in Java for a long time. In my college people loves Java. Then sometime a professor showed me that LabVIEW existed, and I decided to give it a try. The idea of drawing a program instead of writing it sounded very nice. So I started to dig into the LV World and I realized this was exactly was I was looking for, I really loved it, and decided that I would work with LV all my days left...at least I hope so.

Ok, I seldom program some text code in Java or C, for helping my brother in this homework or doing small applications but rest of time I'm a LV guy.

About my experience with LV, well, almost a year in college and almost two at work, not to much really, so, as you can see I'm just a little child compared with some of you, but I'm on my way

[Odd_Modem]

Yes, APL was very cool! I started with a course in Fortran on a DEC LA02 line printer and then chased after courses that used video terminals. We had special APL terminals hooked up to a CDC mainframe. The keyboards had all the Greek characters, etc. on the keycaps and the terminal displayed everything with the special APL character set. If you Google "APL Domino" you'll see some findings that have key escape sequences. This is an artifact of the port of APL to DOS. The terminals for my course actually had a Domino key! I really enjoyed that class. Thirty years later I do everything in LabVIEW and I still feel fresh after eight hours of work. I haven't thought about APL for awhile, but I would imagine that G math could do everything that APL could.

[johnsold]

In college we used Algol on a modified UNIVAC mainframe. Punch cards. Come back the next day to find that you omitted the FIN card.

Then assembler for the PDP-8, 8080, Z80, 80186, and 6502. Switched to Pascal on Zylog single board computers and the Apple ][. When LV 1.2 came out we determined that it could do everything we had attempted in the past several years and everything we could anticipate as far into the future as our crystal ball could see. We switched to LV and have not written more than ten lines of text code since.

Lynn