Highlight LabVIEW's "Easy to learn, difficult to master" status

[Intaris]

I thought a little bit about how this suggestion should be called.  I also feel that NI HAS improved in this area a bit in the last few years but regardless....

We all know that NI sells LV as being "Easy to use" or that people can "rapidly and cost-effectively interface with measurement and control hardware, analyze data, share results, and distribute systems" "regardless of experience".

What I (And I think many others) miss is that there's a serious side to using LV which can only be harnessed by experienced programmers.  I feel that NI should focus more on this "experience scaleability" of LabVIEW which makes it easy to learn but very difficult to master due to the incredible breadth of features and possibilities LV offers.  I'm not a marketing guy, so pelase don't ask me how to do this, but I think that maybe highlighting the software engineering side of LV development would help.  How about pushing examples of the classic software architectures or demonstrating some more advanced features which don't work "regardless of experience".

LabVIEW grows with any user's knowledge of software engineering and I just feel that this should be focussed on a bit more.

I'm interested to hear people's opinions.....

[JackDunaway]

I'm not going to comment on how LabVIEW should be advertised, but I do know this: the LabVIEW Personal Edition should not be pared down, and it should be just as capable as the Professional Edition. There are lots of strings I don't mind attached to this edition, but paring it down to the "no experience, easy to learn" point would leave most of the 120+ people voting for that edition SOL.

> I think most people who would be likely to claim LV is not a "serious" programming language would tend to use this version instead of the "professional" version

Opposite from my experience. People I know with CS degrees have a spurious-at-best view of LabVIEW. If they were to download their Personal Edition and it didn't even have the ability to build an application, they would be justified - "See, it's a joke!" How do you respond to that? They're right. They would still contend it's a scripted, not compiled language. And if you can't build an exe, they're basically right! There's just no market gain by trying to distribute a teaser version to any audience - experienced or not.

I'm making this argument for the sake of the hobbyists and freeware community who treat their free-time programming just as seriously (even more seriously? ) than their eight-to-five. Just because I don't want to earn money using this edition doesn't mean I don't need the full feature set.

[Intaris]

I think nearly everyone's in unison about the need to include "proper" tools (Like applicaiton builder) in the free version.

You're still confusing "paring down for the dummies" with "The dummies would be happy with that version".  They're not equivalent at all.

I don't want a pared down version of anything.

[JackDunaway]

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Intaris wrote:

I don't want a pared down version of anything.

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Alright, we're on the same page. I misunderstood your intentions.

[Intaris]

@Jack,

 'sOK. I didn't articulate myself properly either.

Shane

PS But is the page Letter or A4 format?  That always confuses my printer.......