Quote:
Originally Posted by BitTwiddler
While I am a big advocate of LabView, especially for teaching to beginning programmers I do have a couple of issues with it.
1. It will eat your computer's resources alive. Everywhere you look you see LV's big fat footprint. Plan on dedicating a machine just for LabView programming.
2. It is proprietary and it is not cheap. Once your license expires you'll have to pony up some serious money to continue to use it. It will never replace Java or C++ in popularity because of this one issue.
These two issues are the biggest cons in my book.
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OK let me start by saying that I use LabVIEW every day in my job. I have been using LabVIEW to program for over 15 years now. So I would like to address this question from someone that started using LabVIEW as a beginner and is now a very competent programmer.
LabVIEW is great to start with. The troubleshooting and program analysis is outstanding. You can see the flow of the program what is executing and what numbers you are getting everywhere. The problem with Labview is that it is so easy to get started that most people never learn the proper way to program using LabVIEW. You can get yourself into trouble quickly with resource management and race or chance conditions if you are not careful and follow proper programming techniques.
In the quote above I would say that I have extremely complicated programs running on many different systems. They do not use many resources for the computer that they are running after the install. The only resource that will need space is the instillation of the software itself. If the computer resources are maxed out then you are probably doing something wrong with the code.
The second comment about being expensive is true. It does cost a lot of money for LabVIEW. If you use it everyday, like I do, then it will save a lot of time with development. Things that you would have to code in C++ and Java are already done for you so you are paying for that. I do program in C++ as well so I have that side of programming. Learning C++ helped me understand some of what is going on inside of LabVIEW. If I bought tool kits for C++ or Java that did everything that LabVIEW can do for you out of the box then it would be expensive too.
You will hit limitations with LabVIEW. I have never hit one with programming our robot. We have done Vision and many of the more complex tasks that are required of a really good team and I have never maxed out the performance of the roboRIO. If you learn to do it right then you will not have problems with LabVIEW. It is easy to show someone what you are doing. I have taught many students to program with LabVIEW over the years (fifth year as a mentor)and if you asked them I think they would tell you that reusable code that I can do with LabVIEW makes their lives easier. Teaching them about state machines and producer consumer loops, data flow and to minimize the use of local variables.
If you ever need help with LabVIEW you just let me know. I would be happy to help.
Tim