LabVIEW
Do you still have fun using LabVIEW ?
@rolfk wrote:
@joshua.l.guthrie2.civ wrote:
I'm finding "fun" is becoming inversely proportional to the size of the LabVEW program.
I find that’s true for any programming language I worked with. The difference might be mainly that most other languages start with a much higher baseline of “unfunnyness” and the slope of increase is lower as the application grows larger. So the experienced pain over time often feels smaller in traditional languages but in absolute value you need to get in some fairly big applications to hit that crosspoint.
In Big O notation, unfunny-ness grows with O(N) for text based code, but O(Sqrt(N)) for graphical code. 😄
@IlluminatedG wrote:
@altenbach wrote:
In Big O notation, unfunny-ness grows with O(N) for text based code, but O(Sqrt(N)) for graphical code. 😄
Are you sure it's not O(N^2) because we have two dimensions of layout instead of 1?
Dimensions always ends up getting a though issue. Text code is at least 2 + i, as it has both a number of lines and line length and with i being the irrational dimension of function calls. LabVIEW would then be 3 + i dimensions as a diagram also has a z-order of objects (case and conditional compile structures, and the good ol’ stacked sequence, not to forget the overlapping of nodes, wires and structures). 😀
The overlapping of nodes would be analogous to packing multiple programming expressions into one to “proof” intellectual superiority and stacked sequences are a bit like text lines that are 100s of characters in length.
Multiple expressions into one chaining can be even improved by carefully omitting any unneccessary brackets to proof that you know the operator precedence rules of your language of choice right from your muscle memory. 😀
@Loucoume wrote:
Community is less and less active.
I completely disagree with this sentiment. I see more activity in the community than ever before.
1. There are 4 GDevCons happening (Europe, US, Australia/New Zealand, and Latin America) and the GLA Summit. These are all independent from NI and completely community driven.
2. I'm seeing a bunch of open-source tools being released by the community.
3. The Community Training Initiative (CTI) is getting its ducks in a row to open up LabVIEW training on the cheap. I'm hearing several people designing courses around what CTI has already done and contribute those back.
@Loucoume wrote:
I hope someday it will become free and open source so people will use it again.
We are convincing NI to make parts of LabVIEW open source. I am actively working on the Icon Editor. Allen Smith is actively working on Actor Framework. Sergio, the guy inside of NI who is charge of these initiatives, is asking NI for the next thing to go open. I am personally advocating for the Getting Started Window, especially since that would greatly help the CTI team. See this thread: Share Your Input: The Next LabVIEW Feature to Go Open Source
My ultimate goal is to make everything in LabVIEW that is VI based be open source. All NI would need to worry about then are quality control, the underlying (C/C++/C#) structure, and the compiler. Will this make LabVIEW free? No. Will we be able to convince NI they need to drop pricing due to not needing so much in R&D and maybe support? Possibly.
@Loucoume wrote:
Totally agree, NI let LabVIEW dying slowly. not much evolution, price getting up for not reason, hard to find some support from NI. Community is less and less active. I hope someday it will become free and open source so people will use it again.
Well that is true to some extend but there are several promising signs.
1) NI actively is getting more involved in academia again. Yes, they did drop that ball in the past completely and it is my expectation that it will cost them more to rebuild some of that momentum than it would have cost to maintain what they had in the past.
2) As has been mentioned the community has actually matured. There was a lot of activity in the past but it was almost all NI organized and sponsored. There is a lot more independent activity that was built in the last several years despite of NI rather than because of NI. GDevCon, Community Training Initiative (CTI), GCentral, VIPM, LabVIEW Wiki are all activities that did barely exist 10 to 15 years ago (ok VIPM exists longer 😁), but have some real activity behind it. It could always be more of course, but I think these things show that LabVIEW is still a real thing and that the community cares about it and is still investing time and effort into it.
3) That this forum and other forums like LavaG or the German LabVIEW forum have been getting a lot less active has several reason.
- Other channels such as youtobe that especially youngsters prefer above text based communication platforms.
- Diversification into platforms like Reddit, and before that Stack Overflow and other such things
- The NI forum specifically, because NI people basically were not only not incentivized but in fact discouraged by internal policies to participate. If you are wondering if your job will still exist tomorrow, you are not very likely to spend time on forums that don't directly add to your performance metrics that internal tracking systems are monitoring.
4) Everybody wants things to be free, unless it is providing to your own salary. 🙂
Reality however is, that a system like LabVIEW is to much niche and at the same also to complex to be maintained by a small voluntary group of people. Open Source LabVIEW would almost certainly linger on some source code repository and slowly die the bit-rot death. Some competitors may try to reuse it for something of their own and sell it, but LabVIEW is not Linux. There are only very few people in the whole world who could navigate effectively through the LabVIEW source code and make sense of it without spending years of study. Most of them never heard of LabVIEW and never will want to touch it, as they are busy with other exciting things, such as the Linux kernel. Most of the requests for open sourcing LabVIEW itself are basically curiosity. There are some people in the LabVIEW community, including myself, who would love to have a look at that code. And maybe even fix a little bug here and there. Yes, if I had access to the LabVIEW source code I would have added IPv6 support and even TLS about 15 years ago. I also would have tampered with the File IO to properly support long path names since at least 20 years. But that are nice to have things, but not something that keeps a platform like LabVIEW relevant. Things like adding FPGA support or adding a new OS platform, even if it would be just a variant of an existing platform, are an entirely different problem that I would not likely see myself willing to invest into.
@codcoder wrote:
I think it's important to manage your expectations. LabVIEW is a programming language, but its niche is primarily in electronic test equipment..
This is a misconception. While this is one primary use, the original visionaries put a lot of emphasis on any kind of advanced math (linear algebra, fitting, etc.) and many of my programs would not have been possible without LabVIEW at all (problem bounded by a single programmer mostly doing real research!). In any other programming language it would have taken 10x longer to write and it would only have 10% of the fully interactive UI features.
Performance is fantastic, with a linear speedup with the number of CPU cores. This would have been a nightmare to write in any other environment. While it runs perfectly on an ancient N450 Intel Atom processor, It runs almost 400x faster on a 32(64) core Ryzen. (here are all the benchmarks, feel free to contribute if you have a CPU that is not listed )
Long ago, I have written down some points. It's a bit stale, but still mostly valid.
Even for any "test equipment" (sic) problem, getting the raw data is 1% of the task. What we do with the data after that has infinite possibilities and all can be done directly in the same program!
@codcoder wrote:
If you look at the number of threads started in a LabVIEW forum, yes—the activity is low. But in my opinion, the noise is also lower, and when I start a thread, I’d rather get one or a few good answers than twenty mediocre ones.
Well, LabVIEW is a bounded sandbox and the problems tend to repeat. One could argue that once everything has been discussed, new threads are no longer even needed. 😄
