Do you still have fun using LabVIEW ?

[JÞB]

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@rolfk wrote:

It is not the same as 33 years ago when I first got acquainted with LabVIEW. Back then the sky seemed the limit and everything was new and shiny even when I had to work on an Mac II under System 7, or soon after on Windows 3.1, which was just a graphical user interface on top of good old DOS.

I learned a lot since then. Not just what can be done but also what should or shouldn't be done in LabVIEW. Back then I come from Pascal, with a tiny bit of C and assembly mixed in for spices, and Basic which taught me why programming is a pain. LabVIEW looked like the promised land, resembling the electronic schemata that I had been working with intensively when doing actual hardware. No more missed semicolons, typos in variable names, and compilers complaining about a borked declaration when the actual fault was a missing semicolon in the statement before.

In those over 30 years, LabVIEW has been a passion mostly, sometimes a chore and very few times cause for an anger attack.

I definitely still have fun using LabVIEW, although it feels like we went through a dark and dreadful valley for quite a few years, where I felt less enthusiastic about it. NI's waning support and believe in their own product really put its weight on many activities and just two years ago, before starting to work at my current employer, among other things also to maintain existing LabVIEW systems and develop possibly new ones, I was voicing my feelings that I really wasn't sure how long LabVIEW would be still a viable solution. The reaction was not reassuring, they felt that it was indeed looking like a dead end, but that there were systems that were still running and couldn't easily be just shutdown or replaced.

It's refreshing that NI seems to have returned from their self imposed withdrawal into some ivory tower in the name of short term shareholder value at the cost of everything else. Things are starting to look brighter again, and the renewed focus into academia and education shows that they seem to be willing to keep LabVIEW alive. Without such work put into place, the exposure to LabVIEW for new engineers is practically zero, and no new engineers who know that this tool exists, simply means that nobody is going to use it anymore too. You don't get magically suddenly interested LabVIEW users without planting some seeds.

So yes I feel actually more enthusiastic about the future of LabVIEW again, and that also makes that working in LabVIEW is again fun.

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Some of my memories about LabVIEW involve NI Advertising Posters.  "It's OK to have fun"  and the poorly positioned "LabVIEW in the toilet" marketing (6.0[not 6.i,] 7.1ish?) Posters .  Thankfully,  those advertising campaigns did not come out in the opposite order!

[altenbach]

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@crossrulz wrote:

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@altenbach wrote:

All that said, Personally I dislike challenges with pink wires

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One of the first things I did in that challenge was convert to U8 arrays and then Search 1D Array did the heavy lifting for me. Got me to 4th place.

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I actually did do an U8 implementation, but it was not faster in my case. Did not try very hard after that. 😄

[JÞB]

Someday's I want punchcards and a Plato II Again,  anyone?

[JÞB]

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@JÞB wrote:

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@rolfk wrote:

It is not the same as 33 years ago when I first got acquainted with LabVIEW. Back then the sky seemed the limit and everything was new and shiny even when I had to work on an Mac II under System 7, or soon after on Windows 3.1, which was just a graphical user interface on top of good old DOS.

I learned a lot since then. Not just what can be done but also what should or shouldn't be done in LabVIEW. Back then I come from Pascal, with a tiny bit of C and assembly mixed in for spices, and Basic which taught me why programming is a pain. LabVIEW looked like the promised land, resembling the electronic schemata that I had been working with intensively when doing actual hardware. No more missed semicolons, typos in variable names, and compilers complaining about a borked declaration when the actual fault was a missing semicolon in the statement before.

In those over 30 years, LabVIEW has been a passion mostly, sometimes a chore and very few times cause for an anger attack.

I definitely still have fun using LabVIEW, although it feels like we went through a dark and dreadful valley for quite a few years, where I felt less enthusiastic about it. NI's waning support and believe in their own product really put its weight on many activities and just two years ago, before starting to work at my current employer, among other things also to maintain existing LabVIEW systems and develop possibly new ones, I was voicing my feelings that I really wasn't sure how long LabVIEW would be still a viable solution. The reaction was not reassuring, they felt that it was indeed looking like a dead end, but that there were systems that were still running and couldn't easily be just shutdown or replaced.

It's refreshing that NI seems to have returned from their self imposed withdrawal into some ivory tower in the name of short term shareholder value at the cost of everything else. Things are starting to look brighter again, and the renewed focus into academia and education shows that they seem to be willing to keep LabVIEW alive. Without such work put into place, the exposure to LabVIEW for new engineers is practically zero, and no new engineers who know that this tool exists, simply means that nobody is going to use it anymore too. You don't get magically suddenly interested LabVIEW users without planting some seeds.

So yes I feel actually more enthusiastic about the future of LabVIEW again, and that also makes that working in LabVIEW is again fun.

---

Some of my memories about LabVIEW involve NI Advertising Posters.  "It's OK to have fun"  and the poorly positioned "LabVIEW in the toilet" marketing (6.0[not 6.i,] 7.1ish?) Posters .  Thankfully,  those advertising campaigns did not come out in the opposite order!

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Thankfully,  Noone commented about whether or not it is still OK to have fun with LabVIEW in the gender delineated restrooms!

I'm pretty much retired these days.   But,  I still want all of you developers to have the best too.  Go here and help us help you! 

Let's get fixes the problems in LabVIEW/vi.lib before I hit an "Honest 15k" posts

[DavidBoyd]

Chris,

Replying late here, but in '74 my high school (I graduated 1976) bought a HP 9830A "calculator" (fully programmable device running an early version of HP BASIC), along with a HP9869A card reader.  We went through a ton of these (thanks to Douglas Jones at University of Iowa for the image!):

We annoyed the heck out of the math teacher when a few of us who belonged to a local Explorer post, hosted by a computer peripherals company (Decision Data, Horsham, PA), started keypunching our assignments at post meetings; we'd come back to class and make him turn the little knob on the back of the card reader so it would read our keypunched cards (a darn sight faster too, I still recall).

I suppose I can draw a line through my history from this reminiscence, through early days at RCA with follow-on HP controllers and stacks of GPIB instrumentation, and ultimately to a quarter-century-plus of LabVIEW development... and not finished yet.

Dave

[Jay14159265]

I'm going to say a major detractor is LabVIEW CE. Its easier (more fun) to maintain a Python interpreter and IDE on your computer than it is to maintain LabVIEW CE on your computer. Every year the LabVIEW CE license expires and forces you wipe every NI product off your computer and do a clean Install to make LabVIEW CE run again. I gave up this year after a few hours of downloading and re-installing with no success. So from now on I will not be using LabVIEW for personal projects or answering questions on the forum so to answer the question is LabVIEW still fun to use? The answer is; NO, IT SUCKS!