Thanks, everyone. This is a topic I am interested in, though of course I would like to stay positive on the issue as well. I would like to hear some input on some questions I had.
Team 1318, after much deliberation, decided to use LabVIEW with this year. Had the choice been completely up to me, I would not have done this, but I learned to cope with the language, tolerate it, and use it to program a robot.
My main concern, as programming lead and a graduating senior, was being able to "pass down" the programming skills, instilling my passion for programing in others and giving people skills they will need to be able to competently program in the future, especially if they plan to pursue something programming-related as a career.
Certainly I am aware that programming concepts transcend languages. For example, things like if/else or switch/case in C-based languages can be represented with a case structure in LabVIEW. While loops? For loops? They are also in LabVIEW.
What I tell my new programmers is that this is like learning many different spoken languages. In English class, they learn about subjects, predicates, direct objects, indirect objects, and no matter whether they also learn Spanish, French, Japanese, etc., they will be able to take those concepts and apply them to the other languages. It is my hope that this trait of programming languages has allowed the new programmers to be able to think programmatically, even if LabVIEW is a vast departure from good ol' text-based programming. Thoughts on this?
My next thought is how directly applicable these programming skills will be in "the real world", so to speak. A search on google for "labview programming jobs" returns 136,000 results. What about C? 20,500,000. C++? 7,660,000. Java? 11,200,000. PHP? 12,100,000. Python? 12,600,000. Defenders of LabVIEW are quick to state things like this:
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Originally Posted by Tom Line
It would not make it appear that a portion of the FIRST community are ungrateful ingrates who will complain about being allowed to use a professional grade development system that is used around the world.
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My question is, to what extent is it "used around the world"? Who uses LabVIEW in any real-world application? What advantages do they see in paying for this proprietary programming language as opposed to using a language with open standards such as C++ and the like? Perhaps we can learn something from their motivations. If we saw that, for example, NASA chose LabVIEW because of its ease of debugging and graph-making (because you can out put to a graph indicator), then we would understand that LabVIEW is useful in instances where we would want to make graphs like this.
Even if LabVIEW is not as widely used as text-based programming languages, perhaps this question is less relevant because of the point I stated above (programming concepts are still the same)?
I took a look at the
Tiobe TPCI and LabVIEW is 29. Not that bad, I suppose.
Other than that, I suppose it's a matter of taste. Programming is programming, after all, and you can do most things in both languages thanks to the hard work of WPI. We were frustrated with the long build times required by LabVIEW, but the debugging ability was nice with the ability to easily make graphs or "probe a wire", or things like that. We didn't like the lack of "find in files" or the cluttered-ness of the code, but perhaps it is easier for a new programmer to comprehend LabVIEW (after an informal poll of my programmers).
I would be interested to see what others have to say about these points.