[jcadam]

I remember using LabVIEW around ~2000 to read/display data from a high altitude balloon coming in over packet radio. In that case it seemed at least somewhat useful. It provided a quick and dirty way to grab data from various sources and throw it into some pretty graphs.

Years later, I had to maintain a software application built by a bunch of idiots who thought it would be a great idea to use LabVIEW as their GUI layer (because apparently that was easier than learning/using a proper GUI toolkit). This monstrosity communicated with a back-end running on Solaris via LabVIEW's freaking horrendous TCP control. The whole thing made absolutely no sense. Though LabVIEW did provide a rather nifty visualization of spaghetti code.

I suspect this was a resume-padding exercise for the original authors. Rumor had it that one of the engineers responsible for the decision to use LabVIEW had been hired away by National Instruments. And we all cursed him.

So anyway, after that experience I'm pretty well prejudiced against graphical 'programming'. I took one look at this NiFi thing and said 'Ha! Nope.'