Do you still have fun using LabVIEW ?

[Ficare]

Hello LabVIEW users,

do you still have fun, programming with LabVIEW ?

I attended to several presentation, and had the feeling it became sooooo serious 😅

Maybe LabVIEW programmers had complexes, and wanted to show, and over-prove, that we can do the same as other langages ?...

What are your feelings about that ?

[Yamaeda]

I like it, sometimes it's even fun, but since i work with serious programs (test systems) it becomes serious. It'd be fun with some more creative/crazy projects. 🙂

[alexderjuengere]

....serious monkey buisness ... 😉

[NIquist]

It's definitely different these days. 🤔 The switch to Emerson and the subscription fiasco surely put a damper on any "fun" for a while and it's hard to recover from things like that.

I certainly don't have the enthusiasm I had when I was younger and looked forward to every NI Technical Symposium and Developer Day.  I truly enjoyed spending the afternoon with like-minded engineers, geeking out at all the classes and exhibits.  It always seemed that there was something creative, new and USEFUL coming down the pipe and the NI employees were actually excited about it.  That excitement was contagious and led to better communication between NI and its customers.

I miss those daze... 🤓

EDIT: Almost forgot the important part.  I DO still have fun on this forum!  It's one of the most consistently helpful and friendly places to share ideas and knowledge I have ever experienced.  Kudos to All of You!

[testproggie]

I do, only been at it 15 years and I'm now 65, but yes, I still enjoy it. I'm in automotive sensor environmental testing and requirements change constantly. Every time a program needs a change, I take the opportunity to improve it and start from scratch occasionally. I have been the lone LabVIEW programmer here for most of that time and learned on the job after the previous programmer was let go and I was put into the position. Taken several classes, enjoyed NI Week several times and spent a lot of time in the forums (still do). Recently we hired another programmer with the excellent training in C and Python for a different department. He very quickly picked up LabVIEW skills and blew past me in just a few months. I decided not to pout and learn instead. I have learned so much it has really improved what I can do! I look forward to a few more years of doing this.

Note, my time isn't all LabVIEW, I also design, build test fixtures, place orders for the lab and yada, yada, yada. Days without LabVIEW can be tedious at times...

[paul_a_cardinale]

Yes, I do have fun.

I retired nearly 2 years ago, but I still dabble in LabVIEW (I'm hoping it reduces the rate at which my brain decays).

[rolfk]

It is not the same as 33 years ago when I first got acquainted with LabVIEW. Back then the sky seemed the limit and everything was new and shiny even when I had to work on an Mac II under System 7, or soon after on Windows 3.1, which was just a graphical user interface on top of good old DOS.

I learned a lot since then. Not just what can be done but also what should or shouldn't be done in LabVIEW. Back then I come from Pascal, with a tiny bit of C and assembly mixed in for spices, and Basic which taught me why programming is a pain. LabVIEW looked like the promised land, resembling the electronic schemata that I had been working with intensively when doing actual hardware. No more missed semicolons, typos in variable names, and compilers complaining about a borked declaration when the actual fault was a missing semicolon in the statement before.

In those over 30 years, LabVIEW has been a passion mostly, sometimes a chore and very few times cause for an anger attack.

I definitely still have fun using LabVIEW, although it feels like we went through a dark and dreadful valley for quite a few years, where I felt less enthusiastic about it. NI's waning support and believe in their own product really put its weight on many activities and just two years ago, before starting to work at my current employer, among other things also to maintain existing LabVIEW systems and develop possibly new ones, I was voicing my feelings that I really wasn't sure how long LabVIEW would be still a viable solution. The reaction was not reassuring, they felt that it was indeed looking like a dead end, but that there were systems that were still running and couldn't easily be just shutdown or replaced.

It's refreshing that NI seems to have returned from their self imposed withdrawal into some ivory tower in the name of short term shareholder value at the cost of everything else. Things are starting to look brighter again, and the renewed focus into academia and education shows that they seem to be willing to keep LabVIEW alive. Without such work put into place, the exposure to LabVIEW for new engineers is practically zero, and no new engineers who know that this tool exists, simply means that nobody is going to use it anymore too. You don't get magically suddenly interested LabVIEW users without planting some seeds.

So yes I feel actually more enthusiastic about the future of LabVIEW again, and that also makes that working in LabVIEW is again fun.

[altenbach]

Yes, the new poster still applies, as the old one did back in the last century....

I definitely still have fun teaching my computer new tricks using LabVIEW.

 

[Yamaeda]

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@paul_a_cardinale wrote:

Yes, I do have fun.

I retired nearly 2 years ago, but I still dabble in LabVIEW (I'm hoping it reduces the rate at which my brain decays).

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It certainly does. It's been shown that people that do crosswords decay slower, and i'd be surprised if LV (any programming) doesn't train that muscle. (yes i know it's not technically a muscle it's 3 pounds of fat with electrical wires) 😉

[aeastet]

I have been using LabVIEW for 25 years now. I have enjoyed using and developing with it. I have a unique perspective on this as I develop with LabVIEW everyday and I also mentor for FIRST robotics. LabVIEW used to be a powerhouse in FIRST robotics. Thousands of robotics teams with tens of thousands of students developing robots and code. Now, teams are made fun of for using LabVIEW. There is no support from NI. The code base is 10 years old. Teams do not want to use it because the code they need to be competitive does not exist unless some other team made it and happen to share it. NI has not added anything new for FIRST for many years. This probably began when they start looking at the money and stock holders over the product. Many think that after next year NI will not be part of FIRST any more. LabVIEW was on over 60% of the computer when I started. Now they are on 6% and going down every year.

It has gotten harder and harder to find new LabVIEW developers. When my team has openings it can take 6 months to find someone with experience. I believe that part of this comes from the almost total withdrawal from the academic world. I make sure that all of my new team members are learning a text based language. As a manager, I feel that I need to make sure they have a future and that future is not LabVIEW. We were in the process of switching to text based language after NI switched to subscription model. We have around 40 active users that I manage. It was going to be a be deal to move our code base to a text based language. I feel like we still need to start than move. LabVIEW will be around long enough for us to make that move without having to rush now.

My last thought would have to be that it is hard to have fun with LabVIEW because I feel like I am watching it die. Emerson has a lot of work to do to convince current developers that things have changed before the rest of the users move to a free text based language. It is getting harder and harder to convince my company to spend money for LabVIEW when we get all of the other programming languages for free or they are included with our Microsoft agreement. The more code we move to text based language the harder that argument gets.

It was a good run.