Where do you discuss LabVIEW?

[Tim_S]

2 hours ago, smarlow said:

Yes, I agree.  But the younger generation doesn't seem to care much what it was designed for, and new libraries and bindings are appearing all the time to do all sorts of things.  That is the point I was trying to make.  The young folks like it because it is free to install and use.  Never mind that it is a poor choice for the type of work LabVIEW is designed for, or that the true cost of it shows up later trying to get all the libraries to do something useful. 

Having a limited budget (read as none), I appreciate free stuff. Free stuff is great when it works. I use Clonezilla for imaging systems as I got tired of paying for Acronis or Ghost (they are licensed per machine when you buy one copy at a time). When it doesn't work there is no one to call. NI has a team of experts that they make accessible. That's no small thing and the "young kids" are going to learn the hard way.

Last I heard NI reps around here have convinced at least one global-level group at a Big-Three automotive the best option for a test stand control module is not a custom program in a control module (it takes forever to convince the programming team to put in the flags to bypass things for testing) but a cRIO. I've seen stands with a dozen control modules in them switched out with relays to handle model changes over the years.

[ShaunR]

56 minutes ago, smarlow said:

There are a lot of Linux users here, that is true.  But Windows still predominates by a wide margin, and the Python training bootcamp last year was mostly Windows machines and Macbooks.

 

Python is cross platform so of course it will run on windows and Mac. But the reason why all your "kids" are Python fanatics is because they are Linux fanatics. If they were Windows fanatics they would be C# fanatics instead.

The interesting debate would be how your company protects its intellectual property in the face of a predominately Linux open-source  mindset (not to mention some of the awkward licences for businesses that python relies on).

I look forward to pulling your code from Github

Edited June 23, 2016 by ShaunR

[smarlow]

30 minutes ago, Tim_S said:

Last I heard NI reps around here have convinced at least one global-level group at a Big-Three automotive the best option for a test stand control module is not a custom program in a control module (it takes forever to convince the programming team to put in the flags to bypass things for testing) but a cRIO. I've seen stands with a dozen control modules in them switched out with relays to handle model changes over the years.

33% of a potential market sounds great, until you realize it is one out of three, and the salient customer descriptor is "Big".  Charging higher and higher prices to fewer and fewer deep-pocketed customers is not a long-term strategy for survival.  It looks suspiciously like Keysight, which used to be Agilent, which was once HP... Well, you get the picture.  For years HP tried to make HP-VEE into the next LabVIEW.  Now it appears that NI is trying to make LabVIEW into the next HP-VEE.  Unless they open up all the power of it to many more devices and hardware platforms, I feel it may become a novelty language used by the few data acquisition and test engineers that still have jobs.

[smarlow]

1 minute ago, ShaunR said:

Python is cross platform so of course it will run on windows and Mac. But the reason why all your "kids" are Python fanatics is because they are Linux fanatics. If they were Windows fanatics they would be C# fanatics.

The interesting debate would be how your company protects its intellectual property in the face of a predominately Linux open-source  mindset (not to mention some of the awkward licences for businesses that python relies on).

I look forward to pulling your code from Github

My "company" at the moment is NASA.

[bbean]

On 4/26/2016 at 6:05 PM, Michael Aivaliotis said:

I've been away from the LAVA forums for a couple years. Recently, due to some site maintenance. I decided to hang out and check out some of the cool discussions here on LAVA... I'm still trying to find them.

I don't know what the definition of cool is, but here are some posts that I've found interesting / very instructive:

VI Macros (includes comments from someone named jeffK)

• HAL Demo / Named Events (an offshoot of this discussion by ShaunR)

Turn your front panel into an interactive HTML5 site

LVTN Messenger Library

I am probably leaving out a bunch of others....

I think another potential cause of the downturn in use of lavag is the move of advanced users to their own company/personal blogs for people to present / discuss new ideas.  The motivation I presume is to drive internet traffic / SEO / twitter / instagram / facebook / myspace (was once cool ) links but results in the scattering of the community.  

I don't know about everyone else, but usually when I disappear from lavag for a while it means I'm to busy with "real" (billable) work.  Maybe its a good sign that lavag use is going down 

[Cat]

And here I thought I was just imagining that long-time posters were disappearing...

Personally, I have been posting less for a variety of reasons, some of which have been mentioned already.  1) As I get more gray-haired, I am being moved (pushed?) up the management chain to the point where I am doing less and less "real" work, AKA programming, and more paper-pushing.  2) There have been fewer and fewer new features in LV for me to struggle with and commiserate with you all over. 3) Also part of getting older -- I'm looking at the light at the end of the tunnel with respect to retirement and am therefore locking down much of my code set.  My focus is shifting to cleaning up and documenting the code I will be leaving behind.  Which will probably just be rewritten by my successor with whatever iteration of C# .NET happens to be most popular at the time...

All of that being said, first info-LabVIEW and then LAVA have been an integral part of my development as a programmer.  The vast majority of my time as a LabVIEW programmer has been spent working independently, and even when I was on a team, I was always the most experienced person.  Having this resource of peers and much-better-than-peers has been invaluable.  I certainly wouldn't want it to go away.

We have a newly formed LUG here where I work.  I will definitely talk LAVA up at the next meeting.  Maybe a couple folks will join and put a little blip in that stats chart. :-)

[crelf]

On ‎5‎/‎9‎/‎2016 at 5:36 PM, Reds said:

In short: We are all getting older, our jobs are changing, and there is no organic way for this site to attract new users.

+1

[MarkCG]

On 6/23/2016 at 7:57 AM, smarlow said:

33% of a potential market sounds great, until you realize it is one out of three, and the salient customer descriptor is "Big".  Charging higher and higher prices to fewer and fewer deep-pocketed customers is not a long-term strategy for survival.

You really hit the nail on the head here smarlow!! I wish NI would GET THIS.

[X___]

On 4/26/2016 at 4:48 PM, CopperD said:

I don't know where else to hang out at. The NI forms feel uninviting.

According to the April 2016 TIOBE index LabVIEW is in slot 37 just under RPG and up from 42 in July 2015.

 

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

LabVIEW dropped below 50... Might it be that its rank follows its average user age?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 7/27/2020 at 7:52 PM, X___ said:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

LabVIEW dropped below 50... Might it be that its rank follows its average user age?

Interesting theory. Except that I don't think LabVIEW never got below 35 in that list! 😀

Edited August 3, 2020 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[X___]

On 8/1/2020 at 5:20 AM, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Interesting theory. Except that I don't think LabVIEW ever got below 35 in that list! 😀

Are you seeing things between the lines? LV is not present among the first 50 listed...

In case that helps shedding some more light on reality, here is yet another recent list essentially saying that LV is nowhere to be seen on Github or Stack Overflow:

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/07/27/language-rankings-6-20/

and I am not talking about the list itself, but the graph shown here: 

doesn't list LV, as far as I can tell.

Now I am sure that if you limited this kind of analysis to NI's website or LAVAG, LV would hit top of the list in both cases...

 

 

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

9 hours ago, X___ said:

Are you seeing things between the lines? LV is not present among the first 50 listed...

It used to be present in the first 50 on the TIOBE index, but as far as I remember the highest postion was somewhere in the mid 30ies. The post you quoted states that it was at 37 in 2016. Of course reading back my comment I can see why you might have been confused. There was a "n" missing. 😀

Github LabVIEW projects are few and far in between. Also I'm not sure if Github actively monitors for LabVIEW projects and based on what criteria (file endings, mention of LabVIEW in description, something else?).

Edited August 3, 2020 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Mefistotelis]

The idea of comparing a quarter instead of full timeline is to have kind of derivative of the use of each language - change in the amount of uses, instead of the total uses. Popularity of LV is on decline for several years now. Whether it's 38th or 51st on a chart isn't going to change much.

There are many reasons why that is happening; lack of long-term strategy is visible. There was no reaction to HW engineering being transformed from diagrams into Hardware Description Languages. There was no reaction to major languages giving jurisdiction over specifications to non-profit standardizing orgs. For govs shifting towards open-source SW in bureaucracy and education. Even the reaction to expansion of Code Versioning Systems was lacking. That would be a long post if I tried to list all such missteps.

I'm wondering if there is a strategy now. Some recent actions may suggest NI did set up some goals to reach. I wonder if they realize how far they have to go to reverse the trend in the world we have now.

[X___]

Note that the discussion was not about whether or not LabVIEW is on its way to dominate the landscape, but where it is discussed (both are certainly related).

[Mefistotelis]

1 hour ago, X___ said:

Note that the discussion was not about whether or not LabVIEW is on its way to dominate the landscape, but where it is discussed (both are certainly related).

Right; sorry, I had attention span only to read a few last posts.

10 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

I'm not sure if Github actively monitors for LabVIEW projects and based on what criteria (file endings, mention of LabVIEW in description, something else?).

From a few projects I looked into, only text files like *.lvproj files seem to be detected. Projects with only VIs in them are not marked as LabVIEW, no matter how much are there or what's the file/project name.

[X___]

The binary-no preview nature of LabVIEW code is obviously a problem.

[Neil Pate]

1 hour ago, X___ said:

The binary-no preview nature of LabVIEW code is obviously a problem.

on that note, stumbled upon this last night...

Edited August 4, 2020 by Neil Pate

[X___]

That's working well enough.

Now we need to convince github and other repository cloud storage solutions to run this on their servers...

[Antoine Chalons]

reminds me of vugie's VIpreVIEW

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

12 hours ago, X___ said:

That's working well enough.

Now we need to convince github and other repository cloud storage solutions to run this on their servers...

I don't think that would work well for Github and similar applications. FINALE seems to work (haven't tried it yet) by running a LabVIEW VI (in LabVIEW obviously) to generate HTML documentation from a VI or VI hierarchy. This is then massaged into a format that their special WebApp can handle to view the different elements. Github certainly isn't going to install LabVIEW on their servers in order to run this tool.

They might (very unlikely) use Python code created by Mefistoles and published here to try to scan project repositories to see if they contain LabVIEW files. But why would they bother with that? LabVIEW is not like it is going to be the next big hype in programming ever. What happened with Python is pretty unique and definitely not going to happen for LabVIEW. There never was a chance for that and NI's stance to not seek international standardization didn't help that, but I doubt they could have garnered enough wide spread support for this even if they had seriously wanted to. Not even if they had gotten HP to join the bandwagon, which would have been as likely as the devil going to church 😀.

Edited August 5, 2020 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[X___]

Once the HTML is generated with the provided VIs on the source computer (json files, PNGs and some txt description files plus the boilerplate JS installed with FINALE), that HTML hierarchy can be uploaded on a website (e.g Github). The only thing that is needed is a http server (which is launched by the command http://127.0.0.1:8081 on a local computer in the current FINALE distribution) serving the webpages and running the different js scripts. That could be done by cloud servers at minimal cost.

This could be provided together with the source code in repositories for those who don't have access to LV.

While LV is not a text language, a well-designed LV code should be roughly decipherable by a non LV expert, especially when implementing an algorithm (UI and code mechanics is another matter). This would go a long ways toward establishing LV as an acceptable programming language for scientific applications. Currently it is not, because most scientists using Matlab, python, C, etc. can't even look at the code.

 

Here is an example of how this looks like:

Note that vi.lib and other pre-installed VIs are not accessible and I don't see the conpane of the other VIs...

Edited August 5, 2020 by X___