LabVIEW
Finding Experienced Labview Programmers
@tbob wrote:
My turn: Even though I love Labview, find it fun to use, and believe it is by far the best language for test and measurement, I must agree with Mark H about the overall usefullness of Labview. If I were writing some application like a word processor or such, Labview would not be my choice. It is expensive (how much does a text editor and C++ compiler cost vs Labview?). It is supported by only NI. But for the work I do (test engineering), it is vastly superior in many ways. Being fun to use gives it a huge advantage because it stimulates the user's interest and causes higher productivity, in my opinion. Everyone here that uses Labview loves it. There are a couple of engineers here who want to learn Labview because they see how enthusiastic the Labview programmers are.
Well LabVIEW may be costly but you shouldn't compare it with Visual Studio Express Edition or GCC, to name some. I think you get more into the same league when you compare it with Visual Studio Enterprise Edition and then we are not talking about cheap anymore either!
Yes you get a few languages with that, but I don't think there is anyone that works with J++, C, C++, C#, SQL, VB, and all that together. I think most will use one or two and forget about the rest. And except when going with standard C and C++ (and taking lots of care when programming) you are really locking yourself into a specific tool (and provider too). Microsoft will look to that for sure.
Also some have mentioned Rockwell, Siemens and such. Try to look at the price tag for some of their software and LabVIEW may seem cheap in comparison.
Rolf Kalbermatter
Message Edited by rolfk on 10-30-2007 11:52 AM
@parthabe wrote:
All other SW coding people earn more salary compared to LV people in India, so omly a very few are willing to migrate to LV or take LV as a future career option.
In some cases, I've noticed that in Canada as well... I suspect that it's because managers think it is different (easier, not actual language, for testing only, etc??). It should pay more because you can get the same (similar?) result much faster... (not trying to start a debate... let's pretent we are comparing apples with apples).
@falkpl wrote:
I dont see Labview going away any time soon, just seeing it experiencing some growing pains. While the applications of labview creep into many new industries each year the programmer base does not seem to keep pace. It is clear that this problem I am experience is not just isolated to me. I think that the cost of the development environment is either too expensive or not enough educators have time to learn to introduce labview into high school and university curriculums. This is too bad because if more young engineers have experience with labview an whole generation could be labview ready for their first job and apply it to their applications. I do understand that labview is not the mother of all programming languages but no language is. Each main stream language has a niche market and performs some applications poorly. Programming languages are just tools for controlling and visualizing data. I hope that labview is not stifled by these growing pains because it is a great tool and can make for a very fun and productive career.
One remark that has been done several times already in a more or less explicit way is the one that LabVIEW is very expensive and therefore universities and technical schools can't afford it. This certainly is not a main reason! NI has a special educational program where universities and technical schools will get a substantial discount on LabVIEW (and other NI software) licenses and if one wants to build a whole classroom they will usually have even better special conditions up to complete site licenses for a very competitive price. There is some fine print that you have to use the software for educational purposes to get the maximum discount but price certainly can't be the major issue here.
It's more of finding teachers that are willing to learn and use this in a classroom setting and schools recognizing that this will be for the future of their students. But NI can't force their way into them. There are certain geographical areas where LabVIEW is fairly well known in schools (one I know of are the two swiss technical universities which has probably also something to do with the fact that Macs used to be well known too there in the late 80ies and early 90ies) and also maybe with the fact that certain NI sales forces had an early sense that this could be an ideal starting point to get LabVIEW better situated in the market. But the general sentiment also is important and I still see often that people think LabVIEW is to easy and therefore can't be a professional tool. To bad they don't understand that writing software is never easy but that LabVIEW could allow someone to concentrate more on the real art of it, instead of learning a specific syntax and having to worry about all kinds of low level things such as memory management and similar.
Rolf Kalbermatter
Message Edited by rolfk on 11-01-2007 09:31 AM
