[Alan Anderson]

I'd like to give a counterpoint to the "go with what the mentors know" idea. The TechnoKats went with LabVIEW the first year of the cRIO, mostly because nobody had much experience with it. It meant that the software group that year was a real mentor/student collaboration rather than a classroom-style learning environment. It turned out great.

We've discovered that LabVIEW works well in a group-programming environment, with students able to get a feel for the workings of a piece of code without having to concentrate on reading it the way a text-based language requires. That's why we stick with it even though I now have a lot of experience with it.