When I started my PhD in 2009 I was greeted with a really complex experiment control system written in LabView. Being the new guy I at first tried to figure it

When I started my PhD in 2009 I was greeted with a really complex experiment control system written in LabView. Being the new guy I at first tried to figure it out and build my experiments on top of it, but I found it so frustrating that I eventually started rewriting it in Python. My colleagues & advisors did not approve of this and thought I would have to spend years getting the same amount of functionality they realized in Labview. So I did it secretly in the beginning while continuing to use the old system as well. After 6 months I had completely replaced the old system with a new one based on Python and C++ (for time-critical data analysis tasks that numpy was too slow for). I implemented a graphical IDE in Qt similar to Matlab where you could edit code snippets in multiple windows and execute them interactively. It was similar to Jupyter lab (which didn’t exist back then). I also wrote instrument front panels in Qt, class based abstractions for all instruments in our setup and a management layer that took care of initializing instruments and logging all relevant parameters. It was great fun and my first contact with Python, still amazed that the language allowed me to become productive in it so fast. The system is still in use and has spread to multiple labs by now, and my colleagues mostly acknowledged that Python is actually a good way to control measurement equipment and run experiments (though they still use LabView for simple measurements).