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by dralley 699 days ago
Most industrial automation programming happens in an environment similar to LabView, if not LabView itself. DeltaV, Siemens, Allen-Bradley, etc. Most industrial facilities are absolutely full of them with text-based code being likely a small minority for anything higher level than the firmware of individual PLCs and such.
2 comments
ejiblabahaba 699 days ago
A lot of these environments inherit a visual presentation style (ladder logic) that comes from the pre-computer era, and that works extremely well for electrical schematics when conveying asynchronous conditional behaviors to anyone, even people without much of a math background. There's a lot of more advanced functions these days that you write in plain C code in a hierarchical block, mostly for things like motor control.
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applied_heat 699 days ago
I like function block on Schneider platform for Process control with more analog values than Boolean. It visualizes the inputs, control loop, and output nicely.

Numeric values in ladder feels a bit kludgey

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MisterTea 699 days ago
These are standardized IEC 61131-3 languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61131-3

Ladder, SFC and FBD are all graphical languages used to program PLC's. Ladder is directly based on electrical ladder schematics and common in the USA. The idea was electricians and plant technicians who understood ladder schematics could now program and troubleshoot industrial computers. SFC and FBD were more common in Europe but nowadays you mostly see Structured Text, a Pascal dialect (usually with bolted on vendor OOP lunacy.)

I will admit that for some programs, Ladder is fantastic. Of course ladder can be turned into horrid spaghetti if the programmer doesn't split up the logic properly

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