The Future of LabVIEW

[xiongxinwei]

I would like to ask for your opinion on the future development of labview, will it be replaced by other programming software in the test and measurement industry, such as C#, or Python.

[hooovahh]

Anyone else getting their popcorn?

I cannot predict the future. And worrying about things I can't control gives me anxiety. So I'm just going to chug along as best as I can. My boss likes the work I do, and I like my job. I'll be mindful of industry changes. But at the moment I am not pivoting away from LabVIEW or NI if I can't help it.

[xiongxinwei]

On 7/26/2024 at 9:06 PM, hooovahh said:

Anyone else getting their popcorn?

I cannot predict the future. And worrying about things I can't control gives me anxiety. So I'm just going to chug along as best as I can. My boss likes the work I do, and I like my job. I'll be mindful of industry changes. But at the moment I am not pivoting away from LabVIEW or NI if I can't help it.

You're right, I do worry about nothing.

[brucekr]

I worry some, because I'm self-taught without a degree.  Hoping LabVIEW stays relevant for years to come, but it's prompting me to pick up python and possibly dust off my C.

[mcduff]

I don't work in Industry, I work in a R&D facility but I am slightly pessimistic. My gut feeling is that Python will take over sometime in the near future. I have seen it before. When I first joined my group about 15 years ago all of the analysis was done using Matlab, now everyone uses Python. NI seems seems to be pushing solutions such as Flex Logger, Instrument Studio, etc, instead of LabVIEW. (Interestingly, those solutions look like they were built with NXG.  ) On the plus side, we recently had a presentation by a NI rep who detailed plans for new DAQ equipment that was/is going to be in development. They were looking for feedback. The future is interesting.

[Bryan]

LabVIEW has been my forte throughout my quarter-century or so of employment.  It's what has made me most valuable to present and past employers, (and is what I enjoy doing the most).  

My only real concern at this point would be in finding another job within my purview, that wouldn't require me to relocate my family, should I not be able to continue working for my current employer.  In the current state of things, I'm not concerned - but often wonder if I should be.

[xiongxinwei]

On 8/3/2024 at 3:09 AM, Bryan said:

LabVIEW has been my forte throughout my quarter-century or so of employment.  It's what has made me most valuable to present and past employers, (and is what I enjoy doing the most).  

My only real concern at this point would be in finding another job within my purview, that wouldn't require me to relocate my family, should I not be able to continue working for my current employer.  In the current state of things, I'm not concerned - but often wonder if I should be.

Because of the globalization of trade, European and American companies to bring LabVIEW to China, in the past decade or so test equipment software are mainly developed using LabVIEW, but in recent years the situation is turbulent, reverse globalization, China's rising labor costs, resulting in a large number of European and American companies to withdraw from China, and at present NI's support is not good in China, resulting in many people do not look forward to the LabVIEW in the China's development.

 

 

[infinitenothing]

In the COVID supply chain shake up, we saw some of the dangers of being so dependent and locked into NI and the blackbox that is LabVIEW so we're trying to do more custom design on our own. I've been doing some cool stuff with Python and Verilog. One of my co-workers is doing more with micro-controllers.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 8/2/2024 at 4:56 AM, mcduff said:

NI seems seems to be pushing solutions such as Flex Logger, Instrument Studio, etc, instead of LabVIEW. (Interestingly, those solutions look like they were built with NXG.  ) 

Not quite, they don't use NXG to create these application. NXG is truly and definitely dead. But they use the according C# frameworks and widget libraries they were creating for NXG.

[crossrulz]

1 hour ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Not quite, they don't use NXG to create these application. NXG is truly and definitely dead. But they use the according C# frameworks and widget libraries they were creating for NXG.

To put in a little more detail...

For NI, NXG was way more than just a rewrite of LabVIEW.  NXG was a framework that all of their applications would use.  This is most obvious with the UI.  There is a full project just to manage the UI components: Fuse Design System

[LogMAN]

This was also mentioned in their blog post when they discontinued LabVIEW NXG: Our Commitment to LabVIEW as we Expand our Software Portfolio - NI Community

Quote

To build on the success of LabVIEW, we developed the NXG Platform which has enabled an entirely new set of offerings such as the NXG Web Module, SystemDesigner, FlexLogger, InstrumentStudio, VeriStand, and Digital Pattern Editor.

[Bean]

There should be plenty of work for LabVIEW pros for a long time to come maintaining all the code that's out there, especially as newer developers pass over LabVIEW for Python.  AI just makes coding in Python soooo fast.  I'm no longer at Genuen, but we did make a LabVIEW-Python connector for those who would like to cross the streams (e.g. run Python scripts that control your LabVIEW manual control screen).  It's solid.  I'm attaching a screenshot from Keywords Everywhere so you can see some numbers on search interest.  Yes, Google has adjusted the way it reports this a few times, but fwiw, they have Python heading the other direction.

 

Edited September 16 by Bean
typo, more context on TestScript

[LogMAN]

These statistics can be very misleading as they show interest over time and cannot easily be compared.

For example, this is a comparison between LabVIEW (blue), Simulink (yellow), and Node-RED (red):

Here is another comparison between PHP (blue), C++ (red), C (yellow), JavaScript (green), and C# (purple):

Relatively, each of these languages shows considerable less interest over time and converge towards a similar value. Unfortunately, we can't get the full picture as we do not have earlier data. Otherwise, it would probably show pretty much the same curve as Python does. We are just further along the curve (the hype is over 🙁).

For the sake of completeness, this is the graph for Python:

While everyone is clearly interested in Python, this doesn't mean that any of the other languages is suddenly going to be obsolete or non-functional. People (and businesses) will always follow the hype train, of course.

Though, we should certainly not fall victim to ignorance as clearly the LabVIEW community is not quite as enthusiastic as it used to be. I wonder if we should pitch a Python port of LabVIEW to NI... 😈

[Bean]

Hi, LogMAN –

Thanks for sharing.

1 hour ago, LogMAN said:

These statistics can be very misleading

This is an important point.  One thing I've noticed with Google Trends is to be careful about selecting their suggested search term categories.  For example, "Python" vs. "Python Programming language" graphs look very similar; however, "C++" vs. "C++ High-level programming language" look very different.  Maybe it's the addition of "High-level" in the case of C++.  Either way, I like to look at the raw data so we're not prematurely filtering.  We can intuit some things from the shape of the graphs.  For example, are many more people searching for the python snake vs. the programming language today vs. 20 years ago?  Are people searching for "C++" for some other reason than the programming language?  Keeping these things in mind and looking at the raw plots, while risky, is at least a "known" risk.  What is "unknown" is how Google is deciding when a "C++" raw search gets categorized as a "High-level programming language".

 

1 hour ago, LogMAN said:

For the sake of completeness, this is the graph for Python:

And, here is the raw graph for LabVIEW, C++, Python, and C.  As you can see, C++ and C follow a similar trajectory, which hints, to me at least, that we're not talking about "the letter C".  Again, it's raw data with no categorization by Google, so who knows:

 

1 hour ago, LogMAN said:

I wonder if we should pitch a Python port of LabVIEW to NI... 😈

 

Looking at how LabVIEW disappears from view compared to C++, C, and Python, umm yes?  This is why I wanted to develop TestScript.  It's ~3,000 lines of Python code that lets us abstract sequencing logic away from LabVIEW.  Effectively making LabVIEW a manual-control-screen builder.  Again, I'm not there anymore but the tool is solid, in my biased opinion, and free:  https://www.genuen.com/products/testscript

 

For context, C++ was released in 1985, LabVIEW 1986, and Python 1991.

Edited September 17 by Bean

[Bryan]

I was interested in downloading it to have a look.  However, the download page will not accept an email address from providers such as gmail, hotmail, etc.

[LogMAN]

10 hours ago, Bean said:

This is an important point.  One thing I've noticed with Google Trends is to be careful about selecting their suggested search term categories.  For example, "Python" vs. "Python Programming language" graphs look very similar; however, "C++" vs. "C++ High-level programming language" look very different.  Maybe it's the addition of "High-level" in the case of C++.  Either way, I like to look at the raw data so we're not prematurely filtering.  We can intuit some things from the shape of the graphs.

Completely agree.

10 hours ago, Bean said:

For example, are many more people searching for the python snake vs. the programming language today vs. 20 years ago?  Are people searching for "C++" for some other reason than the programming language?  Keeping these things in mind and looking at the raw plots, while risky, is at least a "known" risk.  What is "unknown" is how Google is deciding when a "C++" raw search gets categorized as a "High-level programming language".

I wonder how the number of people with internet access affect the data. In the past the percentage of technology-agnostic people was probably higher on average than nowadays. Especially for niche topics like LabVIEW.

Quote

What’s most useful for storytelling is our normalized Trends data. This means that when we look at search interest over time for a topic, we’re looking at that interest as a proportion of all searches on all topics on Google at that time and location.

-- What is Google Trends data — and what does it mean? | by Simon Rogers | Google News Lab | Medium

It also makes a difference whether you look at global data or just a specific area. For example, interest for LabVIEW in China and USA are somewhat distinct:

China

USA

There are also distinct changes to the slope when Google decides to improve their categorization systems.

We may also see a sudden decline for languages with the adoption of AI assistants as most developers don't need to search the internet anymore and instead rely on the answers produced by the Copilot integrated in their IDEs. Maybe this is what's happening to the Python chart?

[xiongxinwei]

21 hours ago, LogMAN said:

It also makes a difference whether you look at global data or just a specific area. For example, interest for LabVIEW in China and USA are somewhat distinct:

China

Google search engine not available in China😅

[Bean]

40 minutes ago, xiongxinwei said:

Google search engine not available in China😅

 

And yet, for this year, Google shows peak monthly search interest for LabVIEW occurring in China.  Weird.  The following does not represent total search interest, but peak interest listed by Google in any given month this year:

 

 

Here's the data from the tree map above:

1    China    100
2    Taiwan    96
3    Tunisia    74
4    Switzerland    74
5    South Korea    67
6    Ecuador    58
7    Armenia    57
8    Mexico    57
9    Singapore    56
10    Germany    54
11    Slovenia    52
12    Lebanon    47
13    Austria    42
14    Hungary    35
15    Denmark    33
16    Norway    33
17    Czechia    32
18    Israel    32
19    Finland    31
20    Costa Rica    31
21    Ireland    30
22    Colombia    29
23    Sweden    28
24    Belgium    27
25    Romania    27
26    Malaysia    26
27    United States    25
28    Netherlands    23
29    France    23
30    Italy    23
31    Hong Kong    23
32    India    22
33    Poland    22
34    Peru    22
35    Canada    21
36    Portugal    21
37    Japan    20
38    Pakistan    20
39    New Zealand    19
40    Morocco    19
41    Spain    17
42    United Kingdom    17
43    Slovakia    16
44    Thailand    16
45    Russia    15
46    Algeria    13
47    Serbia    13
48    Australia    12
49    Iran    12
50    Greece    11
51    Egypt    11
52    Venezuela    11
53    South Africa    10
54    Vietnam    10
55    Philippines    9
56    Chile    9
57    United Arab Emirates    7
58    Brazil    6
59    Ukraine    6
60    Türkiye    5
61    Argentina    5
62    Indonesia    5
63    Saudi Arabia    4

Edited September 19 by Bean

[xiongxinwei]

21 hours ago, Bean said:

And yet, for this year, Google shows peak monthly search interest for LabVIEW occurring in China.  Weird.  The following does not represent total search interest, but peak interest listed by Google in any given month this year:

China's LabVIEW users are indeed more, most of them are concentrated in coastal areas, I think it may have something to do with China's huge manufacturing industry, factories inside a lot of test software are developed using LabVIEW.