18
rfc7168
7y

LabVIEW.

Because WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK should you want to use a visual programming language in a professional environment and pay for it.

(Other than: the manufacturer of your measurement device/power supply/electronic load/etc. has already provided a LabVIEW module so you just have, you know, 'click' your program together and be done.

No, we won't give you the documentation on how to do it properly without that piece of crap or even give you code snippets.

(If you don't feel the urge to shoot yourself in the foot, you have obviously too much time on your hands and could simply be reading the interface definitions for that particular interface. At least it's standardized, d'uh.)

Oh, and you want a lightweight application? Here comes the runtime environment! A big clunky ... thing you'll need now to start up even a simple measure-and-log-data-thing.

Well, OK, it works for the occasional Measure-and-Log-Thing. If you don't need the data too fast.

If you want to do something a bit more complex, knock yourself out, but don't ask me to debug it for you afterwards because that colourful entanglement of wires and connections and blocks is a DAMN HUGE MESS and trying to understand how it works feels like defusing a bomb in a shitty action movie.)

Never again.

Comments
  • 2
    I have made an internship in an joinery to see if the job is something to me and they needed such an software, because they specialised in doors and windows and have nothing to do with programming.
  • 4
    @stop Makes sense from the business POV.
    It's not so bad that you can't work with it and I imagine there are even more use-cases like this.
    When you're used to "non-visual" programming however it's a huge pain in the ass.
  • 4
    I had the honor of using Agilent VEE for one small project. I get what it's supposed to be, i just personally don't like it at all.
  • 3
    I worked on a robotics team and we considered switching away from LabVIEW. Here's why we didn't:

    1) $2,000/year from NI
    2) pretty easy to learn for a new student with potentially 0 programming experience
    3) the libraries for C++ and Java were bitches to use and run
    4) all in all, Swithing away from LabVIEW actually wouldn't bring us any performance improvements
  • 2
    Oh - also
    5) simple to use threading
    6) literally built in parallelism
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