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by worldsayshi 1036 days ago
Which for me begs the question, is LabView worth it? It's the only widely used Visual Programming Language I can think of.

Every time someone posts a visual programming language prototype the same claims are made over and over again. Like; adds too much complexity, throws out benefits of text editing, eats up too much screen space etc etc.

I'm convinced that many of those issues can be overcome and that until we figure out how to overcome them I'd like to understand which niches Visual programming really makes sense until then.

If LabView makes sense and is worth it, there ought to be more applications where it makes sense!
2 comments
jayd16 1036 days ago
> It's the only widely used Visual Programming Language I can think of.

Unreal's blueprints are also very widely used in production.

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worldsayshi 1036 days ago
Yeah, is using a visual programming language worth it in that case?
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jayd16 1035 days ago
Yes. Non-coders often find it more approachable. These systems are a good fit for games because games have many static assets that need to be referenced. Dragging and dropping to form an asset reference is preferred to using text ids.
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seanc 1036 days ago
Historically LabView had two other key things going for it besides the low-entry-barrier of visual programming.

1. A GUI comes for free; in LabView each program is two windows, each variable you declare shows up once on your code DAG and then again on your GUI as a switch, text box, slider, etc.

2. National Instruments also had a set of libraries and PCI cards for communicating with lab equipment like benchtop power supplies, voltmeters, and even up to big complex kit like oscilloscopes and exotic telecom protocol emulators.

Those two things enabled people to easily wire up a motley assembly of benchtop instruments and orchestrate them together for a unified test of hardware like circuit boards and so on.

Nowadays EE types have better coding skills and those benchtop instruments all have Ethernet ports and REST API's.

But SpaceX famously uses LabView for some things, most notably for the Dragon flight console.

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