LabVIEW
LabVIEW Pros vs. Cons?
@JÞB wrote:
@Mark_Yedinak wrote:
I can't imagine what a NI shirt is doing to us. I think I'm in some deep trouble.
I can. butt try to keep your pants on
You mean it makes me look like you? 
We are all programmers, and the difference between a text based programmers and a graphical programmer is smaller than you might think. There is a much wider gap separating us from the class of non-programmers. 😄
I know many people that scare me if they just approach a computer. Thes are the ones that try to attach a 2GB video to an e-mail while connected via dialup, and then try over and over because it does not seem to work. These are the people that forward any received hoax as truth to everybody on their address list. They don't know the difference between unzip or zip and they proceed to install winzip because that seems logical. They don't know the difference between downloading vs. unzipping vs. installing a program. A large percentage of the population will never be programmers and they don't want to, no matter how we dumb down the development environment. Similarly, I know people that would never use a screwdriver, even if it came with an instruction manual.
There is no market for APLFI (a programming language for idiots), because anyone creative enough wanting to write a program is also smart enough to learn the basics. (Except for kids (wedo, mindstorms) there is no need for programming for dummies.)
Any programmer needs to know certain basics: Why do we have integers if a DBL can represent the same values? What are good design patterns? What is modular code? What is inplaceness and why do I care? Isn't 4GB really infinite?
All these skills are common to all programmers. Unfortunately, programmers that start out with text based code often initially write horrible LabVIEW code, because they try to re-use their ingrained programming patterns to an environment that requires a different way of thinking. However, any good text programmer can become an excellent LabVIEW programmer after going through some learning curve. The other way is equally easy.
There are no cutoffs and random boundaries as claimed by some. If you have a project with 1000 VIs, the same project in a text based code would be equally more difficult to manage. Given that the LabVIEW environment probably already contains more than 1000 VIs, we should not be able to do anything in LabVIEW by that random rule.
Yes, there are certain things that get a bit hard to manage as the project size increases, such as the LabVIEW hierarchy window. Even an event structure with 30 cases and a couple of hundred controls is a bit tough, but that applies only for the toplevel. A well structured, modular, and hierarchical layout can manage any size of project.
There is no magical law of nature that says that text based projects do not get more complex as the size of the project increases. If anything, graphical code scales better. If you double the code, a text based program with be twice as long, but a graphical program will only grow by sqrt(2) in each dimension. O(N) vs. O(sqrtN) make a big difference as N gets larger.
All that said, I am more productive using LabVIEW, and since resources are limited, that also means the difference between feasible and impossible. 😄
