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In college I had to use labVIEW; a visual language normally used for automation. I found it significantly harder to work with compared to programming the robot

by gen3 6y ago

In college I had to use labVIEW; a visual language normally used for automation. I found it significantly harder to work with compared to programming the robot in C. Part of it has to do with my familiarity of the language / learning what the shapes meant, but another part of it was trying to juggle the programs layout. Eventually, everything became a big mess and was hard to maintain. Using labVIEW over C did have some benefits. It seemed like streamlined concurrency is a major advantage.

Psychlist 6y ago
Multiple 4k monitors help, but IMO the limitation really is "all the code can be displayed at the same time".
- bmitc 6y ago
  > IMO the limitation really is "all the code can be displayed at the same time" You don't have to have all your code inside a single diagram. Any professional LabVIEW programmer has a rule that a single VI (basically function or method) should only require a single modestly sized monitor to view it, aside from a few exceptions. This is akin to text-based languages having a sweet spot of 500-1,000 lines of code per file and keeping a function within a single screen without needing to scroll. Anything above starts to become unwieldy. The size of a LabVIEW diagram isn't a limitation of the medium just like the size of a text-based programming language's file isn't a limitation of the medium. It all boils down to the programmer needing to modularize appropriately.
MH15 6y ago
I interned in a research lab where half the PHDs had their teams use some outdated version of LabView and the other half all used Simulink. There was not real king of feature parity (both the tools have very well developed ecosystems), but the LabView version they used couldn't zoom in or out. Simulink was much preferred.
bmitc 6y ago
> Eventually, everything became a big mess and was hard to maintain. You need to architect your application using classes and functions just like in any other language with whatever appropriate data abstractions present.

by gen3 6y ago

Psychlist 6y ago

Multiple 4k monitors help, but IMO the limitation really is "all the code can be displayed at the same time".

bmitc 6y ago
> IMO the limitation really is "all the code can be displayed at the same time" You don't have to have all your code inside a single diagram. Any professional LabVIEW programmer has a rule that a single VI (basically function or method) should only require a single modestly sized monitor to view it, aside from a few exceptions. This is akin to text-based languages having a sweet spot of 500-1,000 lines of code per file and keeping a function within a single screen without needing to scroll. Anything above starts to become unwieldy. The size of a LabVIEW diagram isn't a limitation of the medium just like the size of a text-based programming language's file isn't a limitation of the medium. It all boils down to the programmer needing to modularize appropriately.

MH15 6y ago

I interned in a research lab where half the PHDs had their teams use some outdated version of LabView and the other half all used Simulink. There was not real king of feature parity (both the tools have very well developed ecosystems), but the LabView version they used couldn't zoom in or out. Simulink was much preferred.

bmitc 6y ago

> Eventually, everything became a big mess and was hard to maintain. You need to architect your application using classes and functions just like in any other language with whatever appropriate data abstractions present.