Comment by bjcy
13 years ago
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on LabVIEW, if you've ever used it: http://www.ni.com/labview/.
It's a graphical programming language with an emphasis on system design (for scientists and engineers) that uses a dataflow paradigm (amongst other things) and has a unique UI creation system.
(Disclaimer: I work for National Instruments and my comments here in no way reflect the views of National Instruments and yadda yadda.)
My experience with LabVIEW, for the brief amount of time I worked with it for our high school robotics team, was slightly frustrating. I liked the dataflow paradigm, and to some degree the dashboard system, but connecting and managing the "wires" was a pain. Especially since I'm more comfortable/faster with a keyboard than I am with a mouse.
It also seemed to be harder to read and understand the flow of the code, which made debugging a pain sometimes. I remember struggling to figure out why my code wasn't working, only to find out I had used 1 instead 1.0 as a constant. The only indicator of the data type was a thin colored border around the box.
LabVIEW seems to do a great job as a kind of Visual Basic for scientists and engineers, but I'd probably find it frustrating to spend any substantial amount of time programming with it.
I understand the frustration. I've run into from a few of my students on the FTC teams that I mentor in my neighborhood. I think that this can be attributed to a lack of really great educational material (there is good stuff out there, but it can be hard to find when the build season really picks up), but on the flip side, I've seen kids in elementary school pick up the basics of dataflow programming, especially when working with the NXT-G software that comes with the Mindstorms NXT.
It's definitely a tool and one should always use the best tool for the job. Sometimes the best tool is not necessarily the one with the most suited features, but the one that you're most adept at using. Either way, thanks for the input, really. It helps a lot to understand what people walk away with when they use a product you've been a part of, and I love that HN users are honest and gracious in their feedback. Cheers.
The whole time I was using LabVIEW (for a class) I kept dreaming of the days when I'd be done with it and back to a typed language.
That's the sentiment that's been conveyed to me when visiting a few university classes that make use of LabVIEW. I think that a great number of programmers that come from textual programming languages (I'm one of them) find the environment jarring as we try to force LabVIEW to fit norms we've built through out experiences in other languages. I think this is a combination of poor educational material catered towards dispelling projected similarities between graphical and textual programming languages and less than great communication beyond the scientific engineering user base of what LabVIEW is really great at.
In any case, thank you for the feedback, it's always great to hear back from fellow programmers that have had experiences with LabVIEW.