I've been in those environments. I've had to try to repair horrific "code" written in it. I've participated in "code reviews" where the straightness of the lines was carefully assessed in the massive mess of spaghetti code they had created and thought was good code.
LabVIEW is a toy for EEs to write prototypes in. That would have been okay if it had stayed there -- but the problem is that people are actually distributing "applications" using it, and trying to maintain them is nearly impossible.
I still don't get why you call it a toy, or just for prototypes. Maybe think somewhat broader and not just about the bad experience(s) you had with it. For the things it's good at, it just works and it's pretty hard to find alternatives (well, Measurement Studio is ok, but for simple things it's usually still a bit more work than Labview). The hard part is figuring out what Labview is good at and not make the mistake of trying to use it for everything. Sound like that's where most of your bad experiences come from.
Here's an example of a place where Labview just shines: I needed something to plot 'rolling' analog and digital signals, i.e. basically provide a visualization of the inputs of a combined analog/digital input card. With ability to pause the thing, each line in a different color, data cursors, ...
The data is acquired by C++ code, but since Labview has this stuff built in getting the whole thing up and running is just a matter of setting up a communication protocol between the C++ part and Labview. I just went for TCP/IP and got the thing up and running in a couple of hours. Has been used like that for years now. Not exactly a prototype, nor a toy. It just does this one thing, it's all we needed, and it does it extremely good.
jki275|7 years ago
LabVIEW is a toy for EEs to write prototypes in. That would have been okay if it had stayed there -- but the problem is that people are actually distributing "applications" using it, and trying to maintain them is nearly impossible.
stinos|7 years ago
Here's an example of a place where Labview just shines: I needed something to plot 'rolling' analog and digital signals, i.e. basically provide a visualization of the inputs of a combined analog/digital input card. With ability to pause the thing, each line in a different color, data cursors, ... The data is acquired by C++ code, but since Labview has this stuff built in getting the whole thing up and running is just a matter of setting up a communication protocol between the C++ part and Labview. I just went for TCP/IP and got the thing up and running in a couple of hours. Has been used like that for years now. Not exactly a prototype, nor a toy. It just does this one thing, it's all we needed, and it does it extremely good.