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Dear Santa NI I am now in my 40s with youngish kids, so despite the fact that all I got for Christmas this year was a Pickle Rick cushion I am not actually complaining. However, I would like to get my order in to the Elves as early as possible. This is my wishlist, in no particular order. I expect this list will not be to everyone's taste, this is ok, this is just my opinion. Make LabVIEW free forever. The war is over, Python has won. If you want to be relevant in 5 to 10 years you need to embrace this. The community edition is a great start but is is probably not enough. Note: I accept it might be necessary to charge for FPGA stuff where I presume you license Xilinx tools. NI is and has always been a hardware company. Make all toolkits free. See the above point. Remove all third party licensing stuff. Nobody makes any money from this anyway. Encourage completely open sharing of code and lead by example. Take all the software engineering knowledge gained during the NXG experiment and start a deep refactor of the current gen IDE. Small changes here please though... we should not have to wait 10 years. Listen to the feedback of your most passionate users during this refactor. NXG failed because you ignored us and just assumed we would consume whatever was placed in front of us. I am talking about the people like those reading this post on Christmas day and their spare time because they are so deeply committed to LabVIEW My eyes are not what they used to be, so please bring in the NXG style vector graphic support so I can adjust the zoom of my block diagram and front panel to suit accordingly As part of the deep refactor, the run-time GUI needs to be modernised. We need proper support for resizable GUIs that react sensible to high DPI environments. Bring the best bits of NXG over to current gen. For example the dockable properties pane. (Sorry not much else comes to mind) Remove support for Linux and Mac and start to prune this cross compatibility from the codebase. I know this is going to get me flamed for eternity from 0.1 % of the users. (You pretty much made this decision for NXG already). Windows 10 is a great OS and has won the war here. Get rid of the 32-bit version and make RT 64-bit compatible. You are a decade overdue here. Add unicode support. I have only needed this a few times, but it is mandatory for a multicultural language in 2021 and going forward Port the Web Module to Current Gen. All the news I have heard is that the Web Module is going to become a standalone product. Please bring this into Current Gen. This has so much potential. Stop adding features for a few years. Spend the engineering effort polishing. Fix the random weirdness we get when deploying to RT Open source as many toolkits as you can. Move the Vision toolkit over to OpenCV and make it open source Sell your hardware a bit cheaper. We love your hardware and the integration with LabVIEW but when you are a big multiple more expensive than a competitor it is very hard to justify the cost. Allow people to source NI hardware through whatever channel makes most sense to them. Currently the rules on hardware purchasing across regions are ridiculous. Bring ni.com into the 21st century. The website is a dinosaur and makes me sad whenever I have to use it Re-engage with universities to inspire the next generation of young engineers and makers. This will be much easier if the price is zero Re-engage with the community of your most passionate supporters. Lately it has felt like there is a black hole when communicating with you Engineer ambitiously? What does this even mean? The people using your products are doing their best, please don't patronise us with this slogan. Take the hard work done in NXG and make VIs into a non-binary format human readable so that we can diff and merge with our choice of SCC tools Remove all hurdles to hand-editing of these files (no more pointless hashes for "protection" of .lvlibs and VIs etc) Openly publish the file formats to allow advanced users to make toolkits. We have some seriously skilled users here who already know how to edit the binary versions! Embrace this, it can only help you. Introduce some kind of virtualenv ala Python. i.e. allow libraries and toolkits to be installed on a per-project basis. (I think this is something JKI are investigating with their new Project Dragon thing) For the love of all that is holy do not integrate Git deeply into LabVIEW. Nobody wants to be locked into someone else's choice of SCC. (That said, I do think everyone should use Git anyway, this is another war that has been won). That is about it for now. All I want is for you guys to succeed so my career of nearly 20 years does not need to be flushed down the toilet like 2020. Love you Neil (Edited: added a few more bullets)

Good selection by @Mefistotelis Try to figure out what motivates them (games, machines, information, ...) and help them find the right resources. Try different things, perhaps something sticks. If not, move on to the next. Here are two links that can get you started with python in a few minutes. Take your first steps with Python - Learn | Microsoft Docs Python Getting Started (w3schools.com)

Depends on a kid. Depends on his interests. If you're just after programming a PC: Scratch is quite popular. There's also similar thing called Blocky. If the kid won't get into things unless that's a game: Baba is you is a great game for kids. He probably already has some favorite games, and many games today use LUA. So he could also start modifying a game he knows using LUA scripts. If he prefers to drive something mechanic, like a robot: There are some DJI products for kids, like Robomaster or Tello. Not the cheapest, but high quality. You can program these. There are actually many programmable robots and robotic arms for kids, just search the net. Arduino is also easily programmable, and there are many sensors, LEDs, displays, motors etc. which you can drive with it.

I agree with all your points. Definitely on making LabVIEW free for all purposes, if not even open source. NI may hang on to the mega-costumers for a while with its current business model. But eventually it'll get marked as a legacy software and slowly replaced by younger people with newer ideas and experience in different, more accessible languages. The idea that a company can sell a programming language these days is ridiculous when there are so many free alternatives. I am not counting the community edition. It needs to be free for any purpose.

Free is maybe pushing it. Zero technical support without a SSP would be an appropriate model associated with open source. Of course this wouldn't prevent a vibrant community support (independent from NI) from existing, but this is not what the big industrial companies using LV would go for. They would remain NI's proverbial cash cows. I think the misunderstanding on the corporate side of why open source is beneficial for code safety and reproducibility is understandable, as I can witness the same ambivalence if not resistance in academia. As for NXG and webUI (or whatever they call it now), as discussed elsewhere, it looks like NI doesn't have the resources to bring the vision (whatever it was originally) to fruition, and their recent decision to abandon it will probably lead (or has already led) to morale cratering and talent effusion, so I wouldn't hold my breath... One thing I'd add to the list is this: stop the yearly versioning breaking backward compatibility. This is frankly moronic and the clear and only reason why this exists is NI pricing scheme. Adopt the scheme suggested in the first paragraph and this can go right away.