06-26-2025 10:16 AM
Because nothing says "professional" like a 3-screen-wide sequence with 50 frames and no comments.
Completely ignore state machines, events, or QMH.
Use "Frame 32" to control logic instead of meaningful state names.
Why route wires cleanly when you can just cross them 100 times?
Don’t label wires.
Cross wires over front panel terminals and structures.
Use random colors for signal wires to make it "artistic".
Just create 17 copies of that enum and update them individually.
Bonus points for different ordering of the same enum in different VIs.
Who needs data flow when you can have data chaos?
Use global variables to pass data between states, loops, even parallel VIs.
Watch your code randomly break when race conditions occur!
1000x1000 pixels. One VI. One love.
Don’t modularize.
Put all logic in one huge block diagram.
Nest structures 10 levels deep.
Just wire errors into a constant and move on. YOLO.
Errors are suggestions, right?
Efficiency? Never heard of it.
Check every button and sensor every millisecond, in a greedy polling loop.
Who needs event structures or timing?
Comments are for the weak.
Use cryptic abbreviations like xxRTCB_Ctrl.vim
with no explanation.
Bonus: Delete all front panel labels and captions.
Standards stifle creativity!
Use different styles in every VI.
Mix camelCase, snake_case, and CAPSLOCK.
If you lose your code, that’s fate.
No Git, no SCC, no backups. Overwrite previous versions with "final2.vi", "reallyFinal.vi", "NEWfinal(3).vi".
Make sure every path, value, and constant is typed manually. Preferably in multiple places.
Forget INI files or config clusters.
Want to change the baud rate? Go find it buried in 12 different places.
Use one loop. One big loop. Forever.
Your boss cries. Your co-workers quit. LabVIEW crashes. NI sends a representative to ask what you've done. 🤣
06-26-2025 11:49 AM
Other possible result: The hacker gets the code limping along; and the boss, never looking under the hood, thinks it's a job well done.
06-26-2025 12:31 PM - edited 06-26-2025 12:38 PM
@paul_a_cardinale wrote:
Other possible result: The hacker gets the code limping along; and the boss, never looking under the hood, thinks it's a job well done.
Sad to say this is what happens most often. Early in my career I was handed some LabVIEW code that was heralded as one of R&D's greatest achievements and told to modify it for the V&V lab. The code was one big loop (OBL) full of locals and flat sequences. To read it you had to follow the Error Cluster squiggling around the block diagram like following a treasure map. (facepalm)
I put my foot down and flat out refused. Then wrote a better more modular program that fit our lab's needs from scratch in less time that I estimated it would have taken to fix that code.
06-27-2025 02:29 AM - edited 06-27-2025 02:30 AM
@RTSLVU wrote:
To read it you had to follow the Error Cluster squiggling around the block diagram like following a treasure map. (facepalm)
At least he had an error line, you can give him that 😄