NI Week - LabVIEW-fest

NI Week is getting close and I'm excited. NI Week is a huge LabVIEW-fest, it's almost all about LabVIEW...LabVIEW presentations, demonstrations, and key-notes. I'm still excited about being at NI Week in spite of that. Luckily there are some LabWindows/CVI presentations and, at least last year, there was a CVI section in the NI display. I want to thank Wendy Logan for her work on the CVI stuff. Here's a link to some of the CVI events.

I'm not a huge LabVIEW fan, mainly because of the mouse use and Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Recently I realized there were other reasons too. I read a book called "In the beginning was the command line" by Neal Stephenson. It talks some about the history of OSs and about controlling the computers. It made me start thinking about how I use computers...not at work but at home. At work, everything is setup for you, you use the OS, tools, etc that work wants you to use.

At home I use Linux (Ubuntu). I like it because if there is a problem, I can look into it, I can figure it out. I can look under the hood...so-to-speak. With LabVIEW, when one of the Vi's doesn't work, or seems to not work, you have to call NI and let them know and they fix it. It's out of my hands. Whatever is under the hood is proprietary, I'm told. You can't just open a Vi with a text editor or compile it from a command line. I can open a file for a C/C++ or Java program, enter it, compile it and run it. Very simple. LabVIEW introduces another layer of abstraction and I just can't see what's below the layer. I've written (in college) a simple C compiler so I understand it, I'm comfortable with it.

LabVIEW is the language of test, the language of the Future, and will be around a long time. You just can see what's under the hood.