[icefo]

I think the main advantage of LabVIEW is not the language but the hardware it runs on. While it is ungodly expensive it's very reliable in a wide range of temperature & vibration.

I used LabVIEW to code the control / data logging of a prototype racecar and the hardware only broke once when we probably zapped it with a nasty ESD or reverse polarity connection somewhere. We never figured it out and didn't ask when we sent the part to be repaired.

Programming in LabVIEW is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy though. It's extremely hard to debug and time consuming to refactor. I always felt that I was 10-50x slower than when I would code in a standard text-based programming language. Working collaboratively also put you in a world of pain because, at least when I used it and I think it's still the case, LabVIEW doesn't support git natively so you have to use an external tool. They have a tool to merge / diff their proprietary binary files but the UX is terrible and I think even if they really tried to do something good, diffing diagrams (which is what a LabVIEW program is IMO) is going to stay hard.

From my experience the people that code in LabVIEW are not software engineer and I had discussions where I was arguing that yes the channel feature is broken but that's not a reason to put all the variables used to communicate between components in a single global variable file for example.

But once you fought against the language long enough and have something that works you can be pretty sure it will keep working forever.

[idealmedtech]

I'd disagree about debugging; you can create custom probes for any given wire that run arbitrary code whenever the data gets updated, that combined with the ability to "hold wire values" aka program state, after execution has finished (or even paused) is a godsend.

Re: merging; yes absolutely, this is totally broken. NI should either release the file format for VIs, or offer conversion to something saner like XML, which you could easily build a nice git-diff tool for.

I maintain that LabVIEW is a good language with a terrible teaching problem; you can do so much if you just master the queued message handler architecture, and you can do things in a way that are extendible and maintainable for years afterwards