[sakian]

I guess I'll give an opposing view of LabVIEW since I've worked on and off with LabVIEW over the past 7 years. I don't think it's too different from other text-based languages where it can be turned into a huge mess if the code is not organized properly. This is probably compounded by LabVIEW being targeted towards people who don't start with software backgrounds and don't understand best practices of software design. Using design methods and frameworks like the actor framework (comes with LabVIEW) can go pretty far to develop clean code that can rival or exceed the best examples of text-based source code.

Definitely LabVIEW has it's strong areas though. Anything to do with more complex UIs is probably not something you want to use LabVIEW for. I'd probably say LabVIEW is definitely strongest when paired with National Instrument's hardware (CompactRIO) which gives you access to data faster than you can do with any other system that I've seen. It's also super easy to develop FPGA applications which is a big plus when working with high-frequency data processing.

Overall I think it fills its niche quite well and don't think it's dissimilar to any other language where you can also make a mess of things if you don't know how to best structure the code.

[elteto]

Yep, LabVIEW is just a gateway drug for NI hardware. The integration with their hardware stack is top notch (as you would expect) and can go from scratch to sampling a signal _very_ quickly.

National Instruments does not make (tons of) money with LabVIEW licenses. The real dollars are in their hardware offerings, which are very good, but also very expensive.

[exmadscientist]

The hardware isn't even that good. What you're really paying for is the idiot proofing (i.e., input protection) and the warranties. Which -- even speaking as someone who has designed competing hardware -- is often a good tradeoff.

[elteto]

Interesting. Are you talking about the cRIO line or the PXI one?

My experience with the PXI line was that it was absolutely top notch. I’ve seen some really cool things done with that. Most electrical folks I’ve worked with loved the hardware but absolutely despised the price gouging. They were constantly looking for alternatives yet NI hw remained for most things.

The cRIO line.... it’s getting better and it has improved a ton, but in the early beginnings it was extremely buggy, both hw and software.

[exmadscientist]

I'm mostly referring to the analog sections of a few PXI cards I've looked at. This was in the context of "turn this benchtop prototype built with PXI into a form-factor product". I was surprised at how simple most of it is. There are a couple TI/BB highly-integrated PGA/ADCs that NI gets a lot of mileage out of.

But even if it's not as complex or interesting as, say, a Keithley electrometer, NI's execution really is top notch. Technical brilliance alone does not a product make.

[elteto]

I see. My experience was with medium test stands (couple of thousands of channels) in a more industrial setting, we didn’t really need high-accuracy or specialized ducers (there were maybe one or two of those and we usually wrote custom software for talking to then). Reliable, accurate enough and with strong platform support was killer for us. I don’t think anyone beats NI at that level of integration.