Ben will carry your message to NI Week!

[Ben]

Well sorta...

I may have the oppertunity to talk with some of the movers and shakers while I am at NI Week this year.

What I was thinking was that if anyone had any great ideas they wanted to get passed along to the people that make a difference at NI then I invite you to start posting those ideas here!

Now this is where the "sorta" part comes into play.

If your idea is one that I strikes my fancy AND I get the chance, I will pass your ideas along. I am not planning on playing favorites or whatever. I just can not promise to pass on ideas I can not make the case for!

So...

If you have ideas, make your argument and I will do my best.

Trying to help,

Ben

[tst]

You know someone is in trouble when they start talking about themselves in the third person.

You know what we want - to see a more "general programming oriented, graphically diverse, (cheaper?)" LabVIEW (or some other name, preferably), which can be used for more general stuff. I am afraid that the (just) case against it in NI (we already make good money, why go head to head with all those other languages?) is enough not to see this fully happen in the near years.

What kind of ideas do you expect? how high level is this shaking? Can we ask you to ask them to finally make a string to timestamp VI or to finally put the strings into the polymorphism of the read\write spreadsheet file VIs instead of having instructions on the diagram? Will that help?

[Ben]

I do not know who or what for sure.

The change the name thing is an idea I can carry.

You are going to have to provide more info on the timestamp request.

Just keep dumping those ideas and I will do what I can. Even if you can not make your case, here and now, share your ideas because it may inspire others who have a similar thought.

Ben

[tst]

Look at this VI, which I built. It's basically the opposite of Date\Time to String (as you can see from its icon) and the request to convert a string to a timestamp is a common one. The point was just to have a similar function built in.

I don't mind LabVIEW remaining with that name (even though I don't like it). I was thinking perhaps of another G compiler (BabyLV?), which will be much cheaper and not engineering\industry\science specific, but more general. Like I said, I don't see NI embarking on such a project when they make such good money from their current work.

It's hard to come up with ideas which are important enough to be burdened on someone else without knowing the kind of people that person will get to talk to. Obviously, there are many things which can be improved, but there is no point in telling you "tell them there is a bug in this VI". Determining the level of importance is hard. For example, those 2 issues I refered to are constantly being asked by beginners, and for a good reason - these are useful features which for some reason were not implemented.

[LV_Pro]

Hopefully I will get to talk to Ben in Austin, and I am definitely a mover and shaker (well I move pretty slow and the medication seems to be helping the shakes!) I know what he means. At NIWeek there are a lot of the decision makers/influencers mingling with the rest of us, and the actually do seem to be interested in our input. Now with Ben's acknowledged prominence in this community he will probably get a chance to bend the ear of a few of them (Greg McK, et al). As to what effect it will ultimately have, who knows, but the squeeky wheel does get the grease. I know at past NIWeeks I have been surprised at some of the people I ended up talking to, particularly at the end of the afternoon "cocktail party" and even more surprised to get follow up emails.

Anybody know where you can get an LED studded Trilobite for my hat?

P.M.

[BJD1613]

Ben,

Try and push the issues that C programmer put together on why C  or C++ is better.  Runtime engine is too big, executable size, speed of apps, etc.  Definetely cheaper.  You always told me that you hope in 10 years we will only be talking about LV so make sure you make that happen!!!  Just my thoughts.