LV vs others

[TG]

QUOTE (hooovahh @ Jun 14 2007, 02:29 PM)

I have never discovered a programming language that can do what I need it to do, and be as quick, and easy to use as LabVIEW. No language is perfect, but for me and what I need from a programming language, LabVIEW is the only choice.

And when ever any one questions LabVIEW's abilities, I always ask them to write a Hello World program, in LabVIEW it takes me less than 15 seconds to create and run a hello world program. Some languages would take longer than 15 seconds just to compile it. Also it's troubleshooting abilities are amazing. I learned to program with LabVIEW, then when I went to Java I had a huge difficulty in finding where problems were. With LabVIEW just highlight execution and you can see exactly what is happening.

For me in my little world LV debugging is excellent but I have always been impressed with Visual Basics ability to trace through execution flow and change code >while its running!<. I aint seen nothing since that impressed me quite like that (When I worked with it) although LV is still very excellent in debugging and I would (am) definately use LV over VB.

my 2c ;

[Doon]

Hiya,

I read an article on Ars Technica which discusses (on the second page) different programmer archetypes. The context of the article is the evolutionary development of the Windows environment and the implementation of the .Net framework. The section, entitled "A Developer Taxonomy," gives an eagle's perspective on programmers' motivations and lends insight into both the resentment expressed by "traditional" programmers and the sometimes parochial views I have witnessed of some LabVIEW programmers.

FWIW, I am glad that there is such a wide variety of programmers out there -- one to fit every need. Not everyone needs to be a hardboiled programmer in order to produce working code.

have a nice day,

-H

[Michael Aivaliotis]

QUOTE (Phillip Brooks @ Apr 25 2008, 05:57 AM)

Woo Hoo! Moved up to #31!

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/pap...tpci/index.html

Moved to #29 now. C'mon, can't we at least beat MATLAB?

[Ton Plomp]

Something strange. LabVIEW went down fast in the latest TIOBE index (number 48).

Ans somehow LabWindows/CVI went up to 36:

36 LabWindows/CVI 0.226%

48 LabVIEW 0.162%

Ton

[PaulG.]

Something strange. LabVIEW went down fast in the latest TIOBE index (number 48).

Ans somehow LabWindows/CVI went up to 36:

36 LabWindows/CVI 0.226%

48 LabVIEW 0.162%

Ton

And here is the new (working) link. Wow. LV is dropping like a stone.

[shoneill]

And here is the new (working) link. Wow. LV is dropping like a stone.

NXT-G (Mindstorms version of LabVIEW?) is listed at # 35 (0.237 %), one place above LabWindows CVI (#36 - 0.226%) whereas LabVIEW is at #48 with 0.162%.

This would place the Language G at a total of (0.237% + 0.162% = 0.399%) which would place it at #26, one place ahead of FORTRAN.

Aren't NXT-G and LabVIEW actually the same Language (G) ?

Shane.

[ShaunR]

NXT-G (Mindstorms version of LabVIEW?) is listed at # 35 (0.237 %), one place above LabWindows CVI (#36 - 0.226%) whereas LabVIEW is at #48 with 0.162%.

This would place the Language G at a total of (0.237% + 0.162% = 0.399%) which would place it at #26, one place ahead of FORTRAN.

Aren't NXT-G and LabVIEW actually the same Language (G) ?

Shane.

NXT-G is very different. It doesn't have the granularity of LV and is more akin to a LV toolkit rather than G itself. Saying they are both "G" is a bit like saying Delphi, C++, PHP, Java etc are all "TEXT".

This is what NXT-G looks like.

You can also see that it is completely sequential.

Edited October 24, 2009 by ShaunR

[shoneill]

NXT-G is very different. It doesn't have the granularity of LV and is more akin to a LV toolkit rather than G itself. Saying they are both "G" is a bit like saying Delphi, C++, PHP, Java etc are all "TEXT".

This is what NXT-G looks like.

You can also see that it is completely sequential.

While the IDEs may be radically different, are you so sure that the language "behind the scenes" is so different to warrant calling it a separate language to G?

Shane.

[ShaunR]

While the IDEs may be radically different, are you so sure that the language "behind the scenes" is so different to warrant calling it a separate language to G?

Shane.

The language "behind the scenes" in Labview is C++. "G" IS labview.

[shoneill]

The language "behind the scenes" in Labview is C++. "G" IS labview.

I always thought this was an old Myth regarding LV. There is NO intermediate C++ code AFAIK. Most of the primitives have direct machine-code representatives.

The IDE is written in C++ (and more and more of it is actually written in G itself).

Shane.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I always thought this was an old Myth regarding LV. There is NO intermediate C++ code AFAIK. Most of the primitives have direct machine-code representatives.

The IDE is written in C++ (and more and more of it is actually written in G itself).

Everything in LabVIEW is ultimately written in C/C++. But yes your diagram is converted directly into machine code to be executed as such. That does not mean that LabVIEW creates the entire machine code itself however. Most LabVIEW nodes for instance are NOT translated into machine code by LabVIEW but are simply some machine code wrapper created by LabVIEW and call ultimately to functions in the LabVIEW runtime kernel. And this runtime kernel, the LabVIEW IDE and the LabVIEW compiler are all written in C/C++.

And yes more and more of the IDE itself are nowadays written in LabVIEW.

But I agree that NXT and G are by far not the same from a user point of view. The programming paradigm used in the NXT environment is highly sequential and quite different than LabVIEW itself. It is LabVIEW Express on steroids but without the real dataflow elements and loop and other structures of normal LabVIEW programming

All that said I wonder how those statistics are generated. Is it user poll, counting publications on a language, websites using the according name, or something else? All of them can represent something but if it is any indication of real world use would be something to be investigated. And such an investigation will always be biased by what the investigators know and find good programming.

[shoneill]

Everything in LabVIEW is ultimately written in C/C++. But yes your diagram is converted directly into machine code to be executed as such. That does not mean that LabVIEW creates the entire machine code itself however. Most LabVIEW nodes for instance are NOT translated into machine code by LabVIEW but are simply some machine code wrapper created by LabVIEW and call ultimately to functions in the LabVIEW runtime kernel. And this runtime kernel, the LabVIEW IDE and the LabVIEW compiler are all written in C/C++.

And yes more and more of the IDE itself are nowadays written in LabVIEW.

But I agree that NXT and G are by far not the same from a user point of view. The programming paradigm used in the NXT environment is highly sequential and quite different than LabVIEW itself. It is LabVIEW Express on steroids but without the real dataflow elements and loop and other structures of normal LabVIEW programming

All that said I wonder how those statistics are generated. Is it user poll, counting publications on a language, websites using the according name, or something else? All of them can represent something but if it is any indication of real world use would be something to be investigated. And such an investigation will always be biased by what the investigators know and find good programming.

What you say about calling the code in the runtime is of course correct.

Reading the site it seems that they simply do a web crawl and assign the number of hits to the number of users somehow. Not terribly reliable but it's at least SOME kind of indicator I suppose.

I've never used NXT so I'm not aware of the differences. I was led to believe it was more or less LabVIEW (or at the very least based heavily on LabVIEW). I suppose exposing kids to inherent parallelism might not lead to much joy on Christmas morning....

Shane.

Edited October 26, 2009 by shoneill

[ShaunR]

What you say about calling the code in the runtime is of course correct.

Reading the site it seems that they simply do a web crawl and assign the number of hits to the number of users somehow. Not terribly reliable but it's at least SOME kind of indicator I suppose.

I've never used NXT so I'm not aware of the differences. I was led to believe it was more or less LabVIEW (or at the very least based heavily on LabVIEW). I suppose exposing kids to inherent parallelism might not lead to much joy on Christmas morning....

Shane.

There is a NXT toolkit for labview. It has its own separate "G" compiler. And I believe you can write code in labview which can be imported into the NXT software. How that works, I don't know. Perhaps one of the NI lurkers could shed more light.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

There is a NXT toolkit for labview. It has its own separate "G" compiler. And I believe you can write code in labview which can be imported into the NXT software. How that works, I don't know. Perhaps one of the NI lurkers could shed more light.

I haven't used it either but I was under the impression that it was basically a Library of VIs that could be used in LabVIEW. And since the NXT is in principle a 32 bit CPU system what they really were doing is using a LabVIEW embedded development system targeted specifically to this NXT CPU. On top of that the NXT software is an IDE that uses mainly Xnodes or whatever the current terminology is.

So what I suspect happening is that the NXT software user configures a software system using something similar to an entirely Express based system, and those Express Nodes call ultimately into the NXT Toolkit VIs and when you run the software, some or all of it gets compiled by the underlaying C cross compiler into a module that can be deployed to the NXT hardware.

This is just a guess but it would be a good reason why there is in fact something as LabVIEW for Embedded at all, since this was the test bed par excellence for this technology.

[Phillip Brooks]

And here is the new (working) link. Wow. LV is dropping like a stone.

Just thinking about the last year and wondered:

o TIOBE index is based on various search engine results for a language

o LAVA was down June/July time frame

o LabVIEW's TIOBE index drops precipitously in the following months

o LabVIEW is slowly climbing back up the ladder (48 to 46)

One could assume that LAVA contributes significantly to the popularity index of LabVIEW

[crelf]

One could assume that LAVA contributes significantly to the popularity index of LabVIEW

I think that's logical