I use to make a living creating LabVIEW solutions for a few years in manufacturing test applications and in laboratory applications before that. It works marve

I use to make a living creating LabVIEW solutions for a few years in manufacturing test applications and in laboratory applications before that. It works marvelously if you want put together a UI to process measurements from a fairly wide variety of instruments. Someone who is very skilled in LabVIEW can run circles around most expert Python or VB/C# .NET programmers trying the same thing. Seriously it's awesome. You get parallelism "out-of-the-box" with no problem at all. BUT... these benefits only hold true within the problem domains that LabVIEW is good at. Once you try to use LabVIEW for truly general-purpose tasks it becomes either unwieldy or no better than open-source tools. Eventually, I had to drop LabVIEW when more and more work involved databases, dealing with network protocols, and heavy integration with API's outside of the NI ecosystem. The $3-5K per developer "seat" is also a barrier to entry for some orgs. I think there's a place for visual programming for certain types of DSL's. Version control, diff'ing, modularization and some of the other things folks are complaining about here are just technical obstacles that can be overcome or worked around with a bit of creativity.