It's not that Labview is great for spectroscopy. It's that it is great for building things to control large, complex scientific apparatus (mine was an X-ray Fou

It's not that Labview is great for spectroscopy. It's that it is great for building things to control large, complex scientific apparatus (mine was an X-ray Fourier spectrometer; the X-ray beamline was also controlled in this way), manage streaming data from dozens of sensors, do the analysis, and rapidly change things around if you stick new hardware in it or need to run things differently. There was C and DSP programming involved on a VxWorks VME crate where things needed to go fast or talk to unsupported hardware, but controlling the whole mechanism was done via Labview. There was no other sane way to manage the complexity.