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LAVA wireworkers...

Allow me to introduce myself into this community. My name is John Pasquarette and I am responsible for NI's Software business (I am in Software Marketing and work closely with Software R&D managers). I am sure I have met many of you over the years, but one of my 2009 New Year's Resolutions is to get more active in the LabVIEW community. I would like to capture more user input and better inform our most active users about various topics coming out of the LabVIEW team here at NI. One of the ways I am trying to do this is with a new blog called Inside LabVIEW. I have been quietly blogging for the past few months (mainly to prove to myself that I will stick with it), and I am now coming out of hiding with my "2009 LabVIEW New Year's Resolutions" blog post. I want to formally invite you guys to take a look periodically at my blog and weigh in on the topics there.

We are constantly talking about strategy, policy, and technology ideas here at NI, and I am hoping that the blog may provide a more nimble, "Web 2.0" approach to tapping into your thoughts on these discussions. The LAVA forums and the info-LV forums will have great discussions periodically on these kinds of topics - in fact, the discussion that pushed me over the hump into action was an info-lv post by David Moore entitled "Will LabVIEW Survive" that many people joined in on. I found that the thread meandered through lots of different topics, many of which are key focus areas or concerns here as well. I hope that the blog will be a more direct way to engage in some of these topics going forward. We'll see how it goes. I hope to cover topics like:

- new ideas we are working on

- background behind feature decisions and release strategies

- new technology areas we are moving into

- policies and practices around support, upgrading, documentation, bug fixing, etc...

- cool applications I see from our LV users

Take a look at some of the things I hope to move forward in 2009. I would love to hear your comments about any of these or other issues that you want to see out of NI. Hopefully, we will both find some value in this in 2009.

Thanks

John Pasquarette

VP, Product Marketing - Software

NI

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Hi John, thanks for posting.

When I evangelize LabVIEW to my co-workers and others, sometimes I say "It's quite possible that in another 50 years, everyone will program computers this way, and text languages will be archaic" I really believe that's possible, for a variety of reasons that we all know and love (dataflow, built-in parallelism, modularity). BUT, then I have to say "but I don't think National Instruments can get us there, since it's designed and marketed as a niche language for a niche market".

Before I make you feel any worse, I don't really think this is NI's fault, or that it's easy to fix. Conquering the world is a might big challenge (Do I hear someone chanting "Open Source... Open Source..." in the background?). However I wish I heard more from NI about this kind of long-term vision, and yes I have been to plenty of NI-Weeks.

But yeah, we need better deployment tools and all that other stuff on your list of New Year's Resolutions.

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QUOTE (jdunham @ Jan 5 2009, 04:25 PM)

Hi John, thanks for posting.

When I evangelize LabVIEW to my co-workers and others, sometimes I say "It's quite possible that in another 50 years, everyone will program computers this way, and text languages will be archaic" I really believe that's possible, for a variety of reasons that we all know and love (dataflow, built-in parallelism, modularity). BUT, then I have to say "but I don't think National Instruments can get us there, since it's designed and marketed as a niche language for a niche market".

Before I make you feel any worse, I don't really think this is NI's fault, or that it's easy to fix. Conquering the world is a might big challenge (Do I hear someone chanting "Open Source... Open Source..." in the background?). However I wish I heard more from NI about this kind of long-term vision, and yes I have been to plenty of NI-Weeks.

But yeah, we need better deployment tools and all that other stuff on your list of New Year's Resolutions.

"It's all part'n'parcel of the whole Genie gig. *PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS!!!* Itty-bitty living space!" - Robin Williams in Disney's Aladdin

That was extremely well put, Mr. Dunham. Thank you.

Joe Z.

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OK, you've touched a nerve here (one of the many exposed nerves that periodically get poked). We have this exact conversation quite a bit internally here at NI. There is a natural (and I think healthy) tension between our incredibly strong and visible LabVIEW software platform and the hardware product lines internally. This goes way back to the early 90s when we moved LV to the PC - the first few versions didn't support calling DLLs. When we considered adding that capability - it was actually provided by a 3rd party first, Downshift from Viewpoint Software - we got a lot of flak from our DAQ product managers because they were concerned that it would allow competitive hardware vendors to support their boards in LabVIEW. Of course, we added it and the rest is history, but we are constantly balancing the "niche" hardware support capabilities of LabVIEW with the "broad-based adoption of the language" forces here internally. In the end, we can't let one of these overshadow the other.

With all of that said, you should start to see some things happening with the platform over the next few years that might give you hope. I could prattle on about how we've moved LV from a desktop DAQ tool into lots of embedded and real-time applications blah blah blah... to try to counter your comments. More importantly, we are looking at both technology and business issues of opening LabVIEW to broader audiences. We also acknowledge that we can learn some things from open source platforms about documentation and approachability for the developer - not saying we are going open source, but we see some good ideas in that world that we could apply. If I can figure out how to act on my Resolution #3 on being more transparent with our roadmaps, I could tell you about this in more detail - but according to our legal team, I would have to kill you if I did. So for now, I'll just leave it with a "stay tuned"

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