http://xkcd.com/1270/
Functional programming is a thing of beauty. Explaining that beauty to those who do not see it is non-trivial. LabVIEW's dataflow isn't functional, but it has many of the same properties, and is a good deal easier to visualize. I find it to be a more-than-acceptable compromise between the ideal computation space and a usable language for actually getting stuff done.
I talked to someone at NI today and they were able to get some slightly more official information (while still being unofficial). Not naming any names, but the word from this individual was that student pricing would be $250, universities was $500, and non-academic pricing would be available for $1,000.
To be clear nothing official but I can't wait to get my hands on one of these.
I'll see your scrolled-case-wires-don't-move and raise you my scrolled-case-VIs-and-controls-don't move. The empty string constants in this BD are used for aligning edges of nodes in the cases:
Oh, now I notice that you mentioned functions.