@billko wrote:
@ooth wrote:
I would have thought this would be a higher priority for NI. If I were a newcomer and experienced this it would turn me off from LabVIEW. They should make the Community Edition very easy to install and register.
I have no idea what the priority is. They make Community Edition presumably to inject new blood into the LabVIEW community, then they make LV a subscription and make it super expensive to price out the exact people they are trying to attract.
Um. As I said, I used to use Labview extensively on some pretty major projects. Apparently, some serious Labview maniacs in Germany had a large, complex, it's-absolutely-not-windows-or-intel-or-amd hardware to control and decided to do everything in Labview. We're talking hundreds of modules and, if one were to code this non-graphically, five or six thousand lines of code. For debugging/diagnostic/engineering work.
I had been a VEE person, going back, I kid you not, to when HP's offerings were various versions of HP Basic, and had been generally aware of LV, but about a decade or so ago started running around with LV extensively. And programming in it for New And Different Things.
VEE is good for a short hack. When things get nasty, that's where LV is superior. And LV's internals, to say the least of it, are complex. It's not just the GUI; we're talking thousands of internal subroutines that, frankly, take the win over the internals of a C compiler. (And, yeah, I've seen the internals of that.) Given that updates to the LV codebase come out several times a year (at least when back when I had an active license and was going beserk with the code), there's an implication that there's at least a couple of dozen staff out there doing bug fixes and new features. As a guess.
Those people don't work for free. And Labview, well, it's not Windows with a billion+ users; I'd guess at less than 100,000 active licensees. So they do have to charge for it, just like Agilent charges for VEE these days, for pretty much the same reason.
But, as you said, one would think that if they're going to publish a Community Version to train up potential new recruits, one would think that from time to time somebody over there would go through the install process on plain vanilla Windows box and make sure that it, well, actually works out of the box.
One thing that I noticed as I went through the uninstall process was that there were a bunch of updates for various and sundry ready and waiting in the package manager. Implying that the Big Download itself was out of date. If I had been a little bit faster on my feet I would have stopped before initiating the uninstall, done the updates, then tried to see if the whole package would install. Still, if that was the case, one would think that the readme file (or whatever passes for it) would have some mention of the need. And there wasn't any such.
Sheesh.
