Can I use text based code in Labveiw

[estradjm]

Although amused as I am to see someone ever compare LabVIEW with the tech found in Minority Report, with the aid of the Kinect and other emerging tech...strictly speaking of the display tom cruise uses in the police precint...we may be PAST it already. The problem is NI has a vested interest in presenting it oddly...that interface was remarkably specific to the task, it was not a programming interface. NI likes to pretend no one needs to write those little drop-and-drag-able components. We have gesture support equal to what Cruise uses and our tracking of humans is better than in the movie; finger tracking is not done on kinect but others have implemented it using kinect. Those gloves he is wearing have lights used by the system to find his hands, but we can do better with kinect-for-windows already. His system handles no voice at all and can only support a single user at a time. This is an example of sci-fi setting a goal and the world going, "Okay, let's do that!"... like star trek communicators and cell phones. Ours are more advanced than theirs.... Anyhow, you are missing the point of UIs like that. They are not intended to code on anymore than gamepads are intended to type novels on.

My background is with Simulink, LabVIEW and MATLAB scripting, and even HDL "programming", with a very loose background in text based programming in C and C++, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I would prefer text based sequential languages to graphical languages, because it complements the way we as humans think. For example, I can do in code so much easier for things that require "looking ahead" than I can with graphical tools like Simulink and LabVIEW, which require a substantial amount of work around or look-up table, and that is one of the many inherent flaws makes them cumbersome tools for programming. G programming has it's place for rapid prototyping and research, but this sort of tool used for actual deployment is asinine....you get a product out to market extremely fast with little to no real expertise in the system or language or even really engineering/programming, but at the expsense of quality, size, efficiency and many other trade-offs. We know this is true, as it has been proven with grade school children using LabVIEW for rapid prototyping of robotic applications for FIRST and it's use in STEM outreach. At the end of the day, it is most of the time just good enough, but really as a developer, you should be cringing at that notion. Back to the age old saying, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should".

[estradjm]

You know, I think NI should take the same approach to their tools as Adobe DreamWeaver has for their product. Some don't have the time or patience to deal with the nut and bolts of the system, but sometimes we WANT that control at our disposal when we do have the knowledge, time or patience to muck around under the hood. Give us the option to do both; text-based and graphical without limited our ability for functionality. At the end of the day, it really all is code, what does it matter if that block was written by an NI programmer or any other programmer? It would make the overall package more enticing to both ways of thinking and expand palpability throughout. I often think to myself of how much easier something in code would be than using LabVIEW or Simulink. The main difference between labVIEW and Simulink, being that with Simulink I can just make a Matlab script, bring those variables in and continue on my work...LabVIEW has no equivelent, which in turn, makes it quite cumbersome for many tasks. The limited capabilities and functionality presented to us with the code snippets you can incorporate into a VI is not enough. The ability for duality and code based scripting/coding should honestly be an area in which NI gives some serious work and thought. It would not defeat the purpose of G programming, it would honestly augment it!

[BlueDraeth]

Dear

Sorry, I cant argee right now. Right now because i'm new to labview. I know Java and C++ well because I struggled some times but every time I found logical solutions and it was all the time clearly structured. In labview i can't see the visual structure, it all gets really fast a big mess and its all the time a big pain to drag and dropp add variables and so one. In my opinion its much more straight forward to auto complete and use text based code with functions and classes. Because you can read it and it doesn't get a mess as fast as in labview. Maybe i will change my mind but right now I cant see in any point why labview nor a other visual based language should be the future.

Maybe you can help me to understand (also because in my opinion the starting guide from National Instruments is really bad, it gives informations about temperature etc. but the really basics and tips how to "code" efficiently they dont give and some videos on hands on programming they also don't show. Its really fustrating for a user in the first hours especially when your are thinking about the price tag you pay for the software)

Best Andrin

[altenbach]

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@BlueDraeth wrote:

Its really fustrating for a user in the first hours

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Well, "first hours" is way too short to form an opinion. It is worse if you know text based code well. 😞

Once you develop an eye for graphical code, the pattern recognition capabilities of our visual system will instantly recognize code patterns (same as recognizing the difference between a cat and an dog is much easier from a picture than from a text only description). One of the powers of LabVIEW is the automatic parallelization of independent code sections, something that is much harder to represent using sequential text based code.

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@BlueDraeth wrote:

big mess and its all the time a big pain to drag and dropp add variables and so one. 

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LabVIEW does not really have "variables" in the sense of classic text based code. A common beginner mistake for users coming from text based languages is to find a flawed substitute. Typically, "the wire is the variable" and nothing needs to be "found". 😄

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@BlueDraeth wrote:

Maybe you can help me to understand (also because in my opinion the starting guide from National Instruments is really bad, it gives informations about temperature etc. but the really basics and tips how to "code" efficiently they dont give and some videos on hands on programming they also don't show.

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There are plenty of tutorials, design templates and example programs that ship with LabVIEW. Many more are posted here.

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@BlueDraeth wrote:

 Because you can read it and it doesn't get a mess as fast as in labview. 

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Text based code grow linearly with size and shoddily programmed grows into a gigantic mess too. A LabVIEW program grows with the square-root of the dimensions, which is less complex. Besides, if your code is a mess, it is not the fault of LabVIEW. A well structured program with subVIs and such is always easy to read, even if it has tremendous functionality.

Many of my LabVIEW programs are pure computations and work exceptionally well. Doing it using text based code would involve 10x more effort, would execute slower, and would have less functionality.

So, just give it time and ask here in the forum for solution pointers to specific issues you might encounter. 😄