Choosing a Language

I’ve decided to start a new series. I recently bought the book “Joel on Software” by Joel Spolsky. It is a collection of his blog posts. He still continues to produce more content today. Some of the articles in this book are a little dated but they seem to hold up to the test of time and continue to be highly regarded. I thought I would read through his book and provide my own commentary on his articles as they pertain to LabVIEW.

The first article in the book is titled: Choosing a Language. In this short article, Joel talks about various reasons why you might choose one programming language over another. He lists a few criteria and his choices of languages that best meet each criterion. Some of the criteria include speed, cross-platform, executable size, GUI Development, CLI development, and a few others. What I found interesting is that he ends with a couple of paragraphs about how syntax is one criterion he generally doesn’t care about. Text-based programmers may not care a whole lot about whether a language uses commas or semicolons, but I think a major reason a lot of developers reach for LabVIEW is its unique graphical syntax.

Why Choose LabVIEW?

The article got me thinking about why someone might choose LabVIEW over another language. I came up with a list of 4 reasons (in no particular order) of why someone might choose LabVIEW for a particular project. These are what I view as the strengths of LabVIEW.

• Syntax – The main reason many people chose LabVIEW is the reason that Joel discards in his article – syntax.
  I think people chose LabVIEW’s graphical syntax for 2 main reasons:
  1. Engineers, LabVIEW’s main audience, tend to think graphically. We naturally draw flow charts and diagrams and so the graphical nature of LabVIEW is easily understood by engineers.
  2. Commas versus semicolons and square brackets versus braces, distract from solving the problem. In LabVIEW, we rarely have to worry about such mundane syntax problems. When programming in text, I often find myself using single quotes when I should have used doubles and those issues rarely seem to come up in LabVIEW. It’s refreshing.
• Talking to Hardware – Talking to hardware is quite easy in LabVIEW particularly with NI hardware which of course integrates seamlessly.
• Parallelism – Creating parallel threads in text-based languages can be cumbersome. In LabVIEW, it can be as simple as dropping another loop on a block diagram. No setting up threads or scheduling required.
• Rapid Prototyping – In LabVIEW every VI has a front panel that acts as its user interface. This makes creating UIs quick, easy and intuitive. You can get a prototype up and running very quickly. There’s no separate compile step. Simply drop a few controls/indicators, quickly wire them up and press the run button. This reminds me very much of something like the REPL in Python, except with a builtin GUI.

Why Did You Choose LabVIEW?

Is there a reason that I am missing? If so please add it in the comments.