LabVIEW
What's new in LabVIEW 2016
@User002 wrote:I agree, but here's the thing. Why get into such an endeavour and stretch themselves thin with little to show for in basically a decade of time and money invested. I mean, what was a reasonable idea back 10 years ago might be quite obsolete today. For example the choice of deprecated WPF as a UI framework.
Technology and paradigms move on. I would guess it was a slight case of hubris caused by a dash of elitism and arrogance that now are beginning to rear its ugly truth.
Yes technology does advance quickly, and having parts of LabVIEW's legacy internal code base being written 30 years ago is one of the things holding LabVIEW back. This gives NI a chance to somewhat start over. I believe they are still planning on bringing some things over, but this gives them a chance to step back and hopefully evaluate where they want the product to be in 30 years from now. Do they still want non scalable block diagrams and front panels where very node is limited to 32 by 32 pixels in an age of 4K monitors? What if NI wanted VIs to have multiple front panels? Multiple block diagrams? Or neither of each? Drastically change the file structure for better loading, faster compile, more open format? Have more of a focus on web technologies by having them be a first class citizen? When LabVIEW was originally written few outside of the tech world would have known what the web is, and now we all have web browsers built into our pocket TVs we carry with us.
Who knows this might be a terrible idea, but NI is clearly moving forward with their plans, and hopefully in the nearish future we'll all be using this new thing and wonder how we got along for so long on the old ways. If they choose to invest in technologies that don't pan out (Silverlight anyone?) at least it will be better than living in the past. Using a 10 year old technology is better than a 30 year old one in most cases right?
One question I've asked and haven't seen an answer for yet was, who at NI was the one that said this should happen? Who had the idea (good or bad) that this monumental shift needed to take place? And what did those conversations look like when they asked for so much R&D support?
I also think it is a bit harsh to call it a glorified tech demo there are features they showed off at the keynote that work. Running a VI in a web browser was not just for show, and I do appreciate a real live demo, even when there are glitches.
@User002 wrote:I can _guarantee_ that already in the Tech Preview there are quite a lot of crusty hacks to get it to run anywhere close with decent performance and functionality.
Oh the irony, now that I think about it. The yet to be released Tech Preview perhaps have to be put to rest because of poor code structure, quality and technology platform deprecation issues.
Here's a tip to NI, why not have an external audit of the whole shebang, code and dev process. Can your egos take it? 
