[DFTF] Drinking from the firehose...

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Example: if you want to compare two items and act if they are equal or not, you can do this with just a few keystrokes in C:
(x == y) ? a : b;
While in Labview you need to wire up a equal block to a select block, and a simple operation looks a bit like speghetti.

I like spaghetti better than oatmeal. You can straighten spaghetti so it looks nice, but oatmeal tends to remain mush no matter how much whitespace you sprinkle through it.

Seriously, if you think a single wire between two blocks (along with the four inputs and one output) looks like spaghetti, you're doing something wrong. This is not an example of LabVIEW making it harder to do something easy. Using the keyboard to type C/C++ is faster than using the mouse to draw using LabVIEW, and compiling a C/C++ program is faster than building a program in LabVIEW. But for someone who isn't already highly skilled in a text-based procedural language, my experience is that having a working program using LabVIEW comes sooner.

This opinion comes from someone who is highly skilled in text-based procedural languages, and who is a relative newcomer to graphical dataflow languages. I just find LabVIEW to be a lot easier to use for the kind of things necessary for FRC robots.