Hi Everyone,
I've recently been attending a local developers group and listening to how other people/companies are dealing with all of the various things that come up when dealing with software project management. Most of these guys are web developers but it's my turn to contribute to the group and I thought an introduction to LabVIEW as an alternative way of programming would be nice to mix things up for them.
My question is: If you were going to present LabVIEW to a group of text-based programmers, what would you cover?
Right now, I think my focus will be on answering these questions
Who uses LabVIEW? -> Engineers, and scientists that have to interface with hardware (not strictly true, but if hardware is not involved that really opens up the available language choices).
What Applications is it well suited for? -> Go over any number of applications involving DAQ, IMAQ, etc... We have plenty from our own company to give a taste.
What about LabVIEW makes it well suited for those applications? -> i) Graphical programming and dataflow offer a nice visual representation that maps nicely to things like state machines, controlling hardware, etc... ii) NI has solved a lot of the driver issues and obviously offers hardware that works well with LabVIEW, iii) Writing parallel processes in LabVIEW is MUCH easier than in text based programs, iv) iterative development is especially fast
Finally, I was going to follow up by covering a number of the topics here and wire up a small application. If I can get it organized, we have DAQ's controlling lasers read by cameras so I may get the hardware setup and show how to turn on and off a light source and view it.
What would you do any differently?