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Yes, I don't assume you use many new features of LabVIEW from the last 10 years if you still develop in LabVIEW 2009.

NI didn't say they would be porting NXG features to 2021, but to future versions of LabVIEW. Technically such a promise would have been unfulfillable, since at the time the NXG demise was announced, LabVIEW 2021 was basically in a state where anything that was to be included in 2021 had to be more or less fully finished and tested. A release of a product like LabVIEW is not like your typical LabVIEW project where you might make last minute changes to the program while testing your application at the customer side. For a software package like LabVIEW, there is a complete code freeze except for breaking bug fixes, then there is a testing, packaging and testing again cycle for the Beta Release, which typically takes a month or two alone, then the Beta phase of about 3 to 4 months and finally the release. So about 6 months before the projected release date, anything that is not considered ready for prime time is simply not included in the product, or sometimes hidden behind an undocumented ini file setting. Considering that, the expectation to see any significant NXG features in LabVIEW 2021 was simply blue eyed and irrational. I agree with you that LabVIEW is a unique programming environment that has some features that are simply unmatched by anything else. And there are areas where its age is clearly showing such as lack of proper Unicode support, and related to that the lack of support for long path names. Personally I feel like I could tackle the lower level part of full Unicode support in LabVIEW including full Unicode path support quite easily if I was part of the development team, but have to admit that the higher level integration into front panels and various interfaces is a very daunting task that I have no idea how I would solve it. Still, reworking the lower level string and path management in LabVIEW to fully support Unicode would be a first and fundamental step to allow the other task of making this available to the UI in a later stage. This low level manager can exist in LabVIEW even if the UI and higher level parts don't yet make use of it. The opposite is not possible. That is just one of many things that need some serious investment to make the whole LabVIEW platform again viable for further development into the future. This example also shows that some of the work needed to port NXG features back to LabVIEW require first some significant effort that will not immediately be visible in a new LabVIEW version. While such a change as described above is definitely possible to do within a few months, the whole task of making whole LabVIEW fully Unicode capable without breaking fundamental backwards compatibility, is definitely something that will take more than one LabVIEW version to eventually fully materialize. There are a few lower hanging fruits that can help prepare for that and should have been done years ago already but were discarded as "being already fixed in NXG" but the full functionality just for full Unicode support in LabVIEW is going to be a herculean task to pull off, without going the path of NXG to reinvent LabVIEW from scratch (which eventually proved to be an unreachable feat). My personal feelings about the future of LabVIEW are mixed. Not so much because LabVIEW couldn't have a future but because of the path NI as a company is heading. They have been changing over the last few years considerably, from an engineering driven to a management driven company. While in the past, engineers had some real say in what NI was going to do, nowadays it's mostly managers who see Excel charts, sale numbers and the stock market exchange as the main decision making thing for NI. Anything else has to be subordinated to the bigger picture of a guaranteed minimum yearly growth percentage and stock price. The traditional Test & Measurement market NI has served for much of its existence is not able to support those growth numbers anymore. So they are making heavy inroads into different markets and seem to consider the traditional T&M market by now just as a legacy rather than a significant contributor to their bottom line.