Quote:
Originally Posted by Danny Diaz
how many hits a particular search term reveals on an engine has VERY LITTLE to do with what this thread initially looked like what it was attempting to do. If you'd like to talk about the technical merits (or not) of LabVIEW in the FIRST program, I'd love to have an open discussion with you.
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I can't swear that this is what Dave was getting at, but it sounds like he was mirroring some of my sentiments. I have never written any Labview, so I can't make any comments as to the language itself. However, I think that a migration to anything that isn't particularly popular in education and in industry is a bad move for FIRST. Though he only provided one data point, what Dave pointed out is that Labview does not appear to be nearly as popular in industry as C or Java. This is a two-fold problem, because it means that teams will have a harder time finding mentors to teach it, and that students won't have as many opportunities to use their learned skills when they graduate. I'd say the same thing about OCaml, Foxpro, or pretty much any other language that isn't BASIC, C, Java, or maybe Python... they definitely have sizable user bases, but not THAT big.
I'm a computer scientist. I trust that I'll be able to pick up Labview pretty quickly should the need arise, so I'm not worried for my team. However, I fear that a move away from "traditional" languages will put teams with minimal programming resources at an even bigger disadvantage.