LabVIEW Pros vs. Cons?

[natasftw]

It'll be hard to speak for the poster in question.  But, you don't always do things professionally that you enjoy.  Some parts of your job are things that you don't like.  I could see how someone would do something for a professional gain even if it wasn't something they were particularly fond of.

In terms of displaying certifications, I don't display mine.  If I post something, it should make sense because it makes sense rather than because I have a fancy graphic that says I've put some effort into understanding the language.  On a resume, I'll post the certification just to make it easier to get my foot into the door.  I'd expect them to ask questions to test just how solid my certification is in that interview, though.

[JHaas]

I agree with the posting certifications. Just wondering why someone would go obtain a CLA and then talk it down

[rolfk]

Several possible explanations. Some people may be in a position where they had to use LabVIEW despite being convinced that it is only a toy, and their employer requiring them to get the certificate. That would be for some a strong motivation to start to hate it.

In general, programmers are often pretty close minded. They find sometimes the tool they know best the only tool that can be used effectively for everything, be it thriving a screw in wiith a hammer or a nail with a screw driver.  

[Synaesthete]

Oh my, this thread coming back to haunt me. I was feeling a little angsty at the time I wrote this as I was pretty mired in some awful work. I found myself writing something more like a business application (like Excel or something) than industrial automation software. My employer was a LabVIEW shop and bid on a project that shouldn't have been done with LV. And I was stuck with it.

I've since put LabVIEW behind me. It was difficult to switch careers as no one has heard of LabVIEW, and those skills aren't apparently transferrable to other types of software engineering, at least as a resume item. Perhaps LabVIEW has value as a benchtop tool. But as a profession as a software engineer, it's a very poor choice. You can get kind of stuck.

It's like there's LabVIEW off in the corner and the rest of the languages are all partying together. A good software engineer can dance through all kinds of languages and platforms. They can take advantage of a very large rich ecosystem of tools. With LabVIEW, you have one big corporation making most of the tools and a lot of smaller companies integrating and offering a sparse selection of tools (JKI does a very nice job though). Take something like the web programming ecosystem, where you have tons of really huge companies all contributing, often as open source. And they're not just contributing tools, but evolving the languages as well. But this is more of an argument against the proprietary nature of LabVIEW.

As for the language itself. When I began programming LabVIEW it was really easy to pick up. I was doing cool stuff with it immediately. But when trying to implement increasingly complex applications, things started breaking down. The graphical programming environment started feeling like a real burden, I just totally capped out and wasn't gaining more efficiency. Now three years in to web programming with text languages and I can't see the end of gains in efficiency, of more scalability. Back to my picture book analogy, pictures are very nice when you're learning to read but they get in the way once you're proficient.

I don't know any other way to put it. I've thoroughly vetted both ways of doing things. I wish NI would phase out LabVIEW entirely and the community wind down, move on to more broadly adopted open platforms. The NI hardware solution is great, and would be so much more powerful with solid integration with modern text based languages.

[JHaas]

I respect your opinion, you've obviously thought about it a lot. For me, personally, I love programming with LabVIEW. As far as that second to last sentence in your post, I'm pretty sure that isn't going to happen.

[ouadji]

@Synaesthete : I approve of LabVIEW's use as a tool for helping non-programmers

                                

try to deeply understand this  code , and then we'll talk!

Labview ... "just a tool for non-programmers" (my god !) .... sorry, but that makes me laugh. 

[Synaesthete]

Sorry, I don't have LabVIEW installed on my Mac. Just a text editor. If it were written in any other language I could view that code pretty easily.

[altenbach]

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@Synaesthete wrote:

If it were written in any other language I could view that code pretty easily.

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Viewing != understanding, so what would be the point? 

There is the right medium for everything: IMHO, some things are just better in graphical form.

• How would you translate the Mona Lisa into text?
• A foreman would not be happy if the architect gave him the plans in text form even thought he could arguably look at them in any text editor.
• What if IKEA would decide to include only pure text instructions.
• Why go see a movie if you could just read the script instead?
• How do you tell a compiler about the desired parallelism and data dependencies between many code clumps running on a multicore machine? Either with many, many incomprehensible words filling many screens or with a graphical diagram. I prefer B! 😄

This is already a very long thread and everything has been said one way or another. Fortunately poeple differ in their skill set imposed interests and capabilities. The world would be a boring place otherwise. 😄

[WayneS1324]

As with Synaesthete... I've left LabVIEW behind as well. At first it was fantastic. I drooled all over any LV code I could get. I even created an FTP server with it for an internal project. In my mind, there was nothing better or easier to understand than a queued state machine. I developed two large projects and a smattering of smaller projects with it before it became boring. Finally, with great enthusiasm, I adopted Measurement Studio and C#. Now, and I can finally say that I'm happy with my job, its pure C++ and I'm completely off of the NI platform (hardware and software). My current projects (and future projects) are developed with C++ using Qt.

[WayneS1324]

ouadji... Impressive!