Leaderboard

With a slightly snarky tone, I want to ask if this is part of the 100 year business plan NI has. On a personal level I just hope LabVIEW can stay relevant until retirement. I do still have a perpetual license to 2022 Q3, which supports Windows 11. So even if NI goes away I'll be able to be in my language of choice until 11 is no longer supported. LabVIEW has changed the way I think about programming in such a way that I think it is hard to go to other languages. My brain thinks in parallel paths, and data dependence, not lines of code and single instructions. Whenever I develop in C++ I can't help but feel how linear it is. I'm sure higher level languages are better, but at the same time I don't really want to change. As long as I can work at a place that needs test applications, and doesn't care how they are developed, I'll be happy pushing LabVIEW. The fog of the future is hard to see though. The next year or two looks very uncertain in my career. But looking at the past, working in LabVIEW has felt like winning the lottery. Thinking about this helps me stay positive.

That is partly NI's work. They were pretty aggressive about defending their idea by applying for quite a few patents and defending them too. Of course if you go to the trouble to apply for a patent you have to be willing to defend it, otherwise you eventually loose the right to a patent anyways. And they did buy up some companies that had something similar to LabVIEW, such as DasyLab for instance, although in my opinion DasyLab didn't quite go beyond the standard "wire some icons together" similar to what HPVee did, and what Node-Red is doing too. But they tried to use some structures that were darn close to LabVIEW loops and that was a prominent NI patent. So NI eventually approached them and made them the offer to either buy them or meet them in front of a judge. The rest is history.

Perhaps it would be better if Elon bought NI and shifted the focus back to "the software is the instrument (and the car, and the rocket...and everywhere)"😀 Bringing the electric car from tiny boring cars to where it is today is a journey the G-language deserves as well.

You mean that sentence: I am not sure he means LabVIEW when he thinks "new technologies". After all that is more the purview of Colonel Kodosky... Who probably wouldn't mind a few extra 100 million dollars for... what about spinning off G and funding an open source project making a graphical Python-based LabVIEW?

TestStand has its place. Yes, it can be a very powerful tool, but where I work, TestStand was someone's hammer and every test solution was a nail. We have several instances where TestStand was grossly overkill, where a more lightweight test executive would have been a better fit. I could write a short novel on all the hassle we've had with our TestStand based testers and the poor planning, development and implementation of it where I work, but I will refrain. (In fact, I did, but deleted it as it went on a long rant). I'll just simply say that I've inherited those @%$#@ machines and they've been nothing but a 4-year headache and I'm slowly replacing each one with a LabVIEW-Only solution. The ones I've done so far perform much better/faster/stronger, are more robust and the operators gripe much less about them if at all. In fact a "notoriously gripey" operator said that they "absolutely loved the new tester" after I had completely reworked it to eliminate TestStand.