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I do love how VIMs came to be. I'm having a real hard time finding it. But there was an idea on the Idea Exchange that there should be a function that can delay any data type, similar to the OpenG Wait which takes an error in and passes it out. Jeff K. posted on the thread saying something like "Oh yeah that is a thing, you just need to use a VIM, here is an example which uses XNodes." It blew my mind. Then in the next release of LabVIEW for the Mac, Jeff K. sneaked in a new VIM on the palette which some high up in R&D didn't know, which had the type specialized structure in it, which was also unreleased. I downloaded that version just to get the VIM and structure. I get the feeling the reason VIMs seemingly came out of nowhere, is that Jeff was pushing for it for years, and then when it was mostly stable he just put it out there to get the public's response. When everyone saw the potential that he also saw in it, R&D put efforts into getting it out there. This is just my speculation from the outside.

Thanks for sharing! I guess I'm just trying to stay positive. Every time the future of LabVIEW is brought up here things goes so gloomy so fast! And I'm trying to wrap my head around what is true and what is nothing but mindset. It's ironic though: last months there has been so much hype around AI being used for programming, especially Googles AlphaCode ranking top 54% in competetive programming (https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode). Writing code from natural text input. So we're heading towards a future where classic "coding" could fast be obsolete, leaving the mundane tasks to the AI. And still, there already is a tool that could help you with that, a tools that has been around for 30 years, a graphical programming tool. So how, how, could LabVIEW not fit in this future?

English *is* my first language and I'm not as eloquent as you are. There is no real argument here, though. I still use LabVIEW 2009 for development because there is little that the later versions offered of significance. It's also robust, stable and fast. That cannot always be said for some of the later versions (looking at you 2011/2012). Some features that actually got us excited weren't even on the roadmap (VIM's anyone?). NI have been so far behind the curve for features that we want that we have all created our own solutions so if one of them actually gets implemented, it's a moot feature. TLS/SSL, for example was only released in LV2020 but I (and Rolf) had created solutions a decade before that. The one thing we have been yelling at NI about for about 15 years is Unicode which we cannot really make a native solution for. This is why I laughed when it was mentioned in this talk. I moved to HTML UI's and relegated LabVIEW to a back-end service through Websockets which solved the problem but it's a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Darin.K made the suggestion of being able to extract sub-arrays by specifying the start and end of the subset, rather than the start and length as LabVIEW allows. I had written this XNode a while back, so have just tidied it up. ToDo: - Accept 2D (and greater) arrays - Make growable for multiple subarray outputs (would also be useful for the builtin Array Subset) Requires: LabVIEW 8.6.1+ Gavin Burnell's Scripting Tools (invaluable!) Index Array Subset.zip