BreakPoint
LabVIEW vs. Nokia Qt
Nothing new. Chris made similar comments back in 2007. 🙂
Good programmers have strong personal preferences and if Chris can get more done in qt, that's fine with me. If the new cell phone in his UAV runs Maemo or Symbian, that might bias the decision too. I am not familiar with qt, so I cannot comment directly.
Here's why I settled on LabVIEW, again personal preference. 🙂
I am a nonlinear thinker and my though process is more graphical than verbal. I make typing errors and hate it if a missing semicolon breaks my code. (A broken wire is easier to find than a typing mistake!). I like to do many things in parallel, but without having to manage this explicitly. Once I have written my code in LabVIEW, I get the UI for free at the same time.
I can truly say that LabVIEW made me a better programmer and allowed me to do things that would be much harder in any other language. (This is coming from a guy that started with Fortran IV in the early seventies. ;))
Chris, thanks for the clarification.
OK, I understand the economical argument. (sorry, I only briefly glanced at the twitter post this morning and it seems twitter is blocked at work so I could not take a second look)
LabVIEW really needs a home/hobby licensing scheme that allows building applications, especially also for embedded/FPGA targets for private, noncommercial hobby use. (For example the spartan-3E is currently only available to universities with FPGA teaching licenses. I want one but I cannot have it! :().
This is a huge untapped market! Home tinkerers controlling or monitoring their model trains, weather stations, climate controls, blinds, BBQ meat thermometers, etc. on ultracheap networked, embedded targets all over the house, and all running LabVIEW. 🙂
(compare with e.g. SunSPOTs or Ardunino you mentioned.)
In todays economy, there are probably quite a few unemployed engineers that could even use it to learn new things and improve their programming skills.
Kids should be able to use all aspects of LabVIEW. Nobody loses if they don't like it, but every kid that later finds employment in the industry can bias company policy on what development system to use. I guess that's the argument for the pricing of current student edition. But yes, the limitations are significant. Maybe if they would allow building applications with a watermark to prevent commercial use?
(I am probably biased, because I was always in academia and have no industry experience. I am also not a lawyer or economist. ;))
JackDunaway wrote:
I would really like to see the community's response to this request... post a new Idea. I would love to see an approach like Fog Creek takes.
