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The other day, I wrote up a lengthy response to a thread about NXG on the LabVIEW Champions Forum. Fortunately, my computer blue-screened before I could post it--I kind of had the feeling that I was saying too much and it was turning into a "drunk history of NXG" story. Buy me some drinks at the next in-person NIWeek/CLA/GLA Summit/GDevCon, and I'll tell you what I really think! First, I'll say that abandoning NXG was a brave move and I laud NI for making it. I'm biased; I've been advocating this position for many years, well before I left NI in 2014. I called it "The Brian Powell Plan". I'm hopeful, but realistic, about LabVIEW's future. I think it will take a year or more for NI to figure out how to unify the R&D worlds of CurrentGen and NXG--how to modify teams, product planning, code fragments, and everything else. I believe the CurrentGen team was successful because it was small and people left them alone (for the most part). Will the "new world without NXG" return us to the days of a giant software team where everyone inside NI has an opinion about every feature and how it's on the hook for creating 20-40% revenue growth? I sure hope not. That's what I think will take some time for NI to figure out. Will the best of NXG show up easily in CurrentGen? No! But I think the CurrentGen LabVIEW R&D team might finally get the resources to improve some of the big architectural challenges inside the codebase. Also, NI has enormously better product planning capability than they did when I left. I am optimistic about LabVIEW's future.

The future is Python for many of the applications, it is easy to get in to for newcomers to programming, works great has a strong package management system and large community, and can be applied to virtually any OS you can think of, as well as it can be even used to program GPUs if you are so inclined. The huge advantage of using G and LabVIEW is that paired with NI Hardware, in the hands of someone skilled with LV you can bang out a solid prototype of a product or a Test and Measurement system so fast it will make people's heads spin. NI hardware is absolutely top notch for High End use cases or rapid prototyping, complex one offs , scientific use or complicated Test and Measurement end of line test space. However in the IoT there is strong competition for the NI SB RIO line up, for a SB RIO you will pay 1500 US. There are so may cheap programmable & capable pieces of hardware, such as Jetson Nano (ARM7+NVidia GPU for vision) or Raspberry PI (ARM7 1.4 GHz with 8GB RAM) or even Asus Tinker Board ... which will serve so many purposes and have onboard GPIO and can be purchased for 50-60 bucks ... that in that space Python paired with Linux knowledge is really making headway. And if you want to go with ZynQ from Xlinix you can get a board with FPGA ~300 Bucks, which is basically the same HW as SB RIO, all you have to do is use different software tools. If NI would consider unlocking the ability use NI FPGA with the ability to deploy to non NI Hardware ... I think this is where G absolutely would take off like wildfire and be used on millions of IoT devices everywhere in the world that are powered by and ARM7 + FPGA module... but as it stands now if you use NI FPGA you must deploy on a target you've purchased from NI. I'll really be a stickler but if we're talking about the programming language we should talk of G. LabVIEW the IDE. Never say never, I am not aware of any other graphical programming language which could be used for general purpose programing and is as complete as G. If you have come across something interesting I would like to look at it, but I feel that it would be at best an academic project, which I would not use in production code.

Unzip the installer, read the READ ME, run the installer, read the help (LabVIEW -> Menu -> Help -> Y Controls). If you're curious, look in the source. Y Controls Support Version 1.0.0.1 Installer.zip Y Controls Version 1.0.0.1 Source.zip

Hopefully this alleviates any concerns about LabVIEW becoming unsupported in the future in favor of NXG.

This 100%. I guess we have to all wait and see, but I'm not feeling very good about this for my long-term career aspirations at the moment.