14 replies to this topic

[neil]

ok, so I am curious by nature. I like to learn things. One of my favourite methods is looking at what people smarter than me have done.

This is the primary reason why I like to look inside the VIs inside vi.lib. Nothing sinister, I just want to be a better programmer. What better place than to learn from the gurus, right?

I say this from looking at quite a few: WOW! quite a lot of those VIs, written by some fairly big-name LV stars, are a bit shocking! They just scream rush job. No wonder you guys password protect them...

This is not mean to start a flame war, but seriously, you guys need to spend some of those billions in profit you make and employ a few more programmers so you can tidy up the existing stuff.

[hooovahh]

I think this is an unfair comment, and is likely to cause a flame war regardless of the intent.

I would like to state the obvious, which is that the code was never intended to be seen by a customer, and as a result NI would likely rather spend the time developing features which cause greater sales, and has more customer satisfaction (ie bug fixes). Cleaning up a VI that no one will ever see (...kinda) does not add to the value of LabVIEW. I would certainly not do some of the things NI does in some of their passworded vi.lib VIs, but we are not in the same business, we just use the same tool.

[ShaunR]

ok, so I am curious by nature. I like to learn things. One of my favourite methods is looking at what people smarter than me have done.
<snip>
This is not mean to start a flame war, but seriously, you guys need to spend some of those billions in profit you make and employ a few more programmers so you can tidy up the existing stuff.

Well. I wouldn't worry too much. Now that the script kiddies have been waving their metaphorical wieners at NI as regards password protection of diagrams. I don't think that you will be seeing many more.

[neil]

I think this is an unfair comment, and is likely to cause a flame war regardless of the intent.

I would like to state the obvious, which is that the code was never intended to be seen by a customer, and as a result NI would likely rather spend the time developing features which cause greater sales, and has more customer satisfaction (ie bug fixes). Cleaning up a VI that no one will ever see (...kinda) does not add to the value of LabVIEW. I would certainly not do some of the things NI does in some of their passworded vi.lib VIs, but we are not in the same business, we just use the same tool.

hooovahh, I really don't want to start a flame war, but here is my rebuttal to you: the code I have seen is poorly coded: any bugs in this code will take MUCH longer to be fixed due to the difficult nature of debugging such code. If it was coded properly this time would be better spent introducing new features.

Are you 100% happy with the performance of the LabVIEW IDE? If these kinds of things were opened up then it is possible that "outsiders" could contribute and make everything better.

I call it eating your own dogfood. It is massively hypocritical of NI to say "code things this way" and then they go and break the rules themselves in their own code. A lot of the code I have seen would never pass the CLD exam due to so many style violations.

[hooovahh]

the script kiddies have been waving their metaphorical wieners at NI...

I like this, I may make it my new signature

Are you 100% happy with the performance of the LabVIEW IDE? If these kinds of things were opened up then it is possible that "outsiders" could contribute and make everything better.

I call it eating your own dogfood. It is massively hypocritical of NI to say "code things this way" and then they go and break the rules themselves in their own code. A lot of the code I have seen would never pass the CLD exam due to so many style violations.

I think we can all agree that LabVIEW could be better and in the past few releases I've been happy with the progression of features, and stability. I just think that NI has done a pretty good job of managing where their time is best spent. Sure I complain when I see new features and functions that I'll never use being developed and refined, but overall I understand why they put effort into the things they do. If I had a choice of NI working on cleaning up some VIs, or to implement the top 10 idea exchange features, I think the majority would choose the idea exchange.

I do understand your comment about CLD worthy code. I would like to add that this is not limited to the passworded VIs. I've seen VI.lib stuff that is open that is not up to snuff with their best practices. I used to see a lot of example VIs poorly done as well but I'm having difficulty finding them now, so I suspect they went back and did clean up their examples to be more CLD in quality.

[Justin Goeres]

I call it eating your own dogfood. It is massively hypocritical of NI to say "code things this way" and then they go and break the rules themselves in their own code. A lot of the code I have seen would never pass the CLD exam due to so many style violations.

Congratulations. You have discovered that a commercial software product has private code in it that wasn't written by an architect, while simultaneously reminding us all that you have the ability to view password-protected block diagrams. Have a cookie.

Everyone else, this is essentially a troll thread. Consider that when/if replying.

[neil]

I like this, I may make it my new signature


I think we can all agree that LabVIEW could be better and in the past few releases I've been happy with the progression of features, and stability. I just think that NI has done a pretty good job of managing where their time is best spent. Sure I complain when I see new features and functions that I'll never use being developed and refined, but overall I understand why they put effort into the things they do. If I had a choice of NI working on cleaning up some VIs, or to implement the top 10 idea exchange features, I think the majority would choose the idea exchange.

I do understand your comment about CLD worthy code. I would like to add that this is not limited to the passworded VIs. I've seen VI.lib stuff that is open that is not up to snuff with their best practices. I use to see alot of example VIs poorly done as well but I'm having difficulty finding them now, so I suspect they went back and did clean up their examples to be more CLD in quality.

Sure, a lot of the examples are clearly just old code (pre Event-Structure in a lot of cases, and we all know that is never the prettiest code), and that is a big job to refactor them all.

My problem is that NI should use the practices internally that they teach externally. In the real world, it is, in my opinion, quite bad behaviour to put in shoddy/rushed code just to get more features in, and that is what it feels like is being done. If this happens on a project (and yes, we have all been at the wrong end of the time-pressure stick) it is a sign that something else is wrong. Someone is overworked, resources are being allocated incorrectly etc. It does not feel like professional software development.

Congratulations. You have discovered that a commercial software product has private code in it that wasn't written by an architect, while simultaneously reminding us all that you have the ability to view password-protected block diagrams. Have a cookie.

Everyone else, this is essentially a troll thread. Consider that when/if replying.

You are kidding right?

[lordexod]

I've seen all diagrams (vi, vit, llb, lvlibp) in all modules and toolkits, It is easier to do over again.

[Aristos Queue]

you guys need to spend some of those billions in profit

That was billion, singular, in revenue, not profit.

[neil]

That was billion, singular, in revenue, not profit.

ok, but to (mis) quote Jerry Seinfeld "National Instruments, we are doing very well". I would hate to think that internally you RnD guys are so time pressured that you would produce bad code. Some of the code I have seen could not have been peer reviewed!

I am not trying to troll, get anybody worked up, or to wave any weiners around. Just trying to have a sensible discussion about something I noticed that I thought did not really seem "right".

sigh... what has the internet turned into these days....

[hooovahh]

sigh... what has the internet turned into these days....

[neil]

[MikaelH]

Many VIs are still very nicely written, but could be better optimized.
E.g. This VI was probably written before the for loop got the Conditional Terminal.

[Phillip Brooks]

Maybe what we need is some sort of community patch that we can install to fix these things...

[hooovahh]

Maybe what we need is some sort of community patch that we can install to fix these things...

That'd be quite an undertaking, and as mentioned in that thread people are going to want to customize what things are modified in the patch and what things aren't.

In a slightly unrelated topic, thank you for putting the "Now is the right time to use" in your signature. On more than one occasion I couldn't remember what the scan from string wanted, and I knew I just had to find a post you made to find it.