Aristos Queue

I have a theory for what a good UI for GIT would look like, and it is a bit different from the existing ones. I think there should be a picture of the current state of the world. You draw a picture of the state you want. Then the tool generates the command line commands that get you from A to B. This serves two purposes: rather than taking an action and then seeing if that did what you want, it puts the UI in charge of figuring out how to get you textually what you're specifying graphically. Second, it shows the user what the commands are that it is executing so that you figure out "oh, that's how that is done" so that when the UI inevitably hits its limits (for whatever reason, GIT seems to exceed the complexity of all UIs used to render it), then the user is already are familiar with the commandline interface. I don't think I'll ever be motivated to write this UI, but I figured I'd toss out that bit of brainstorming in case anyone decides to chase that albatross.

THIS. Absolutely this. Misery loves company: please use GIT!

GIT is that awful, in my opinion. I've screwed up many things years. I try not to use it as much as possible. The reason that GIT has taken over the SCC world is not because of its ease of comprehension or elegance of interface. It is because it is the only tool that can manage the full complexity of massive software teams, parallel releases, compression of features, etc, and the folks who use it daily just deal with it and get used to it.

Glad I could help. I’ve already seen it have some small external impacts on how NI interacts with customers (in both cases, positively). We will have to wait and see whether it turns into anything more substantive.

NI had a massive online event, the company updated the website, our execs have given interviews, and I-don’t-know-how-many employees are on social media. I’m not sure how much louder we can amplify this. All I did is repeat what has been said in other public forums. 🙂 If I happened to use words that got the point across, great. But the content ain’t new!

The core of our business has changed. Fewer users are developing their own test applications; instead, they're buying something off the shelf like TestStand. Fewer users are developing their own data acquisition software; instead, they're buying something off the shelf like FlexLogger. This trend alters significantly the role of LabVIEW (CG and NXG) in the NI ecosystem -- it becomes far less important to support whole application development (though, of course, we still do and will) and far more important to support "just a bit of customization" when the pre-built tools fail. A lot of software has an endless array of switches and options, but LV provides the ability for a user to write a custom routine to specify the behavior they want in some corner niche of a product. Think like Signal Express, able to generate sine wave, square wave, triangle wave or "pick a VI that generates the wave that you need" wave. What's funny about this is that although the app devs are growing rarer, they're also individually growing more profitable for NI as a whole because the companies still paying to develop custom software are the ones that are generally buying a lot of hardware to do something unique in the world (or not in the world, in the case of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Ad Astra, etc.). So I don't expect the big scale parts of LabVIEW to vanish, but I do expect them to be driven by specific requests from megascale customers rather than from the massed collective. The massed collective will be driving more of the IDE developments. At least, that's my suspicion at this time based on the presentations I've seen.

It is uncommon enough to do the job -- truly unique is hard to do with the limits imposed on modern logos. Color: The folks who study this said that the blue was a color used all over the place in corporate logos; the green is much rarer. There's really only a handful of colors that are available for corporate logos: red and blue are the big dogs, then green/purple/orange. And black. Yellow doesn't have enough contrast -- as we constantly prove trying to put the LV logo on things, so it has to be boxed into stuff. Yes, you pick a shade of those colors, but your logo will be bucketed anyway -- Hulu, TechCrunch, and NI have very different greens, but it's all just "green" when evaluating uniqueness. What that means is, yeah, you can argue about particular shades, but it's hard to actually be unique, so it is all about finding a not-as-common color for your industry. Green works for NI. Symbol: The logo has to be renderable recognizably down to absurdly small sizes, which limits how many places you can put the logo before you end up with a smudge -- which happened to the blue eagle a lot. Something that is easily represented by vectors scales a lot better. The eagle was a distinctly USA symbol in some places -- sometimes a pro, sometimes a con. Or it was recognized as something else. The new logo isn't a representation of anything, so it doesn't accidentally pick up cultural baggage. Is it wild and unique? No. Generally, modern multinational logos cannot afford to be splashy like the old LabVIEW logo was -- too many colors limits where you can use it, and too many graphics limits its scale. But it'll be recognizable. That's the goal more than anything. And it represents a break from the past, and there was a fair amount in that presentation that was different than the Dr. T era. Most of it good, some of it aspirational. We'll see how it goes.

I liked it in theory, but I'm seeing a bunch of warnings online about Stylish having become malware that is shipping private information to third-party. You might want to investigate.

I answered the question you were really asking, which was, “Did you idiots even think before implementing this junk?” If you had wanted an actual explanation of the feature, I’ve seen your posts often enough to know you would have asked directly. You didn’t ask that, so I didn’t answer that. Your response to JeffP strongly suggests that I was right. X__, it is honestly hard to tell in many of your posts whether you want an answer or just want to pick a fight. My goal is to answer customer questions about LabVIEW and its design and to learn enough to fix designs that aren’t working. Please, if you want a more useful answer, ask a question that isn’t snark and doesn’t require Latin translation. It would make helping you a lot easier — and I mean that *even if* your question is about R&D’s general lack of forethought.

Yes. It is an excellent change from CurGen that makes source management far easier for all use cases that we have evaluated.

Place any new items in a separate map and then merge them after the loop finishes.

NI already did: it is called LabVIEW NXG. NI created NXG specifically to address weaknesses in LabVIEW 20xx UI layer. The LabVIEW 20xx editor is antiquated, but its C++ code is very hard to modify. Given that NI's focus for user interfaces is almost entirely in NXG, there is very slim chance of further developments ever in the LabVIEW 20xx control editor. I cannot say "no, never" just as I never promise "yes" on future functionality even when I'm actively working on it, but I will say that it would take significant user encouragement for NI to fund the 20xx control editor ahead of other 20xx priorities, and I don't expect that to happen.

No. That's not what I said at all.

Nope. Variant attributes and maps use the same — identical — underlying data structure. For reasons I don’t grasp, the C++ compiler adds a couple extra instructions in the maps case only when the keys are strings that aren’t in the variant attributes. Still, the conversion time to/from variant for the value tends to dominate for any real application.

Of your six items, NXG addresses three of them and has improved support for a fourth. The source code control stuff is still in flight -- not sure when the target is for delivery [again, not my department]. Sealed classes is so far down the priority list, it's not even in the backlog I bet. I couldn't get traction for that in LV20xx.