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Community Edition does have Application Builder. Are you saying you think they're looking to discontinue LabVIEW? If they aren't going to sell it anymore, it would be great if they'd make it open source. Not sure how likely that is though.

Does it help to re-ask the question as "where should LabVIEW have a future?" It is not difficult to name a number of capabilities (some already stated here) that are extremely useful to anyone collecting or analyzing data that are either unique, or much simpler, using LabVIEW. They're often taken for granted and we forget how significant they are and how much power they unlock. For example (and others can add more): FPGA - much easier than any text-based FPGA programming, and so powerful to have deterministic computational access to the raw data stream Machine vision - especially combined with a card like the 1473R, though it's falling behind without CoaXPress Units - yes no-one uses them , but they can extend strict programming to validation of correct algorithm implementation Parallel and multi-threaded programming - is there any language as simple for constructing parallel code? Not to mention natural array computations Real-time programming Data-flow - a coherent way of treating data as the main object of interest, fundamental, yet a near-unique programming paradigm with many advantages and all integrated into a single programming environment where all the compilation and optimization is handled under the hood (with almost enough ability to tweak that) Unfortunately NI appear to be backing away from many of these strengths, and other features have been vastly overtaken (image processing has hardly been developed in the last 10 years, GUI design got sidetracked into NXG unfortunately). But the combination of low-level control in a very high-level language seems far too powerful and useful to have no future at all.