[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

When was the last time you used LabVIEW?

Last year, before we switched to java.

I'm just going to contradict you there. Sorry, but you're making assertions that are flatly false. LabVIEW has applicability in the fields of medicine, aerospace engineering, industrial control, data collection and analysis, electronic device testing, cryptographic communication, process automation, user interface design, etc. And if you don't think knowledge of parallel processing, interprocess communication, dataflow concepts, modularization, etc. are significant, I don't know what to say.

"Limited" and "none" are not the same thing - after all, we're not talking about prolog here. I'd say the same thing about programming in, say, IDL; it's certainly used in certain applications, even almost exclusively in some, but its applicability is at least an order of magnitude smaller than that of Java.

And I don't think it's all that contentious to say that learning LabView will probably not teach you how to program in other text-based languages, while learning Java probably will.

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

I think your disagreement with him is semantic. I think by "limited applicability", he meant exactly those fields you mentioned, which can be seen as limited because I'd imagine LV doesn't cut it for most software projects on consumer devices (which is what most software writing grads at our uni end up doing), and you need specialized hardware to LV programs whereas C++ and Java are open and standardized. Basically, you may be able to do a lot of things with LV, but most things you can do with LV, you can also do with a C based language, yet the reverse is not true.

I wouldn't say LV teaches you parallel processing and such. It does it automatically for you and when you realize that's happening, it's probably because you don't want it to do that automatically. I've mentored students who started with LV, knew enough to program the bot, yet when we switched to Java, they had to relearn threading, OOP...etc, well, pretty much everything. The way LV presents those concepts is radically different from the way text base programming languages do, which is why it's uniquely good at some tasks, but the skills and concepts don't translate well to other languages.

Pretty much this.