Is switching from LabVIEW a bad idea?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by taichichuan

As an employer of embedded developers that work in environments such as Android, embedded Linux, VxWorks and several others, I can say the the experience of C/C++ will help ensure that your students are employable.

Having experience with C/C++ will arguably help them be employable as embedded software developers. If that's what they want to do, great. It'll certainly give them more options.

LabVIEW is the sort of programming environment that gets used by "just plain engineers" who don't do software as a primary job function. Knowing how to use it is a major plus in a wide variety of careers. It's also tremendously powerful for "real programmers" who want to take advantage of the wide availability of toolkits for many applications.

C/C++ provides the programmer vast flexibility and power, but I've always said that it gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you're disciplined enough, it's great. If not, it's easy to make stupid mistakes that result in a perfectly valid program that doesn't do at all what was intended.

In my day job, I'm a software developer. I write programs for embedded systems, for web servers, for database front-ends, and for process automation. I use languages ranging from assembly to Pascal to C/C++ to VB to Tcl/Tk to G (LabVIEW). Plus two dialects of SQL, a bit of PostScript, and a couple of special-purpose "languages" of my own creation that are essentially function libraries. My general tool of choice is actually Tcl in most cases, though I think LabVIEW is very good for creating large programs that are easy to maintain.