Java vs Labview

[BHS_STopping]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

You're absolutely right and they do the exact same things (forget cases, I can use a while or for loop for the exact same functionality too), so this is going to seem like a petty request for some people, but the question I'm proposing is: if it ain't broke, why change its name? In every C like syntax language, there's an if-statement. I'd have to think hard to come up with a language without an if statement. Smalltalk, maybe?

It's extremely confusing for people who knew Java/C++ or most other programming language and switch to LV and find that something that is functionally the exact same exists but under a completely different name. It's things like this that turn people off from using LV, and first impressions matter. It took me a few weeks to be convinced that LV wasn't the language of the devil, and some other programmers I know still hate it with passion. (There were other LV interface quirks that had impatient high school me pretty annoyed: autoformat was too compact, copying and pasting over a while loop brings out a new dimension, broken wires everywhere, tiny connector nodes, unintuitive true/false in code, auto connecting with new blocks in proximity...etc.)

Then again, these are issues that most new programmers won't be having issues about and other languages definitely have their own problems, so what do I know?

Fair points all around. I find that LabVIEW is easier to teach to people with zero programming background and are interested in control systems. The fact that it's proprietary is a bit of a turn-off, but I haven't had any bad experiences with it so far (and I had two summer jobs which forced me to use NI products exclusively!). That said, I'm still torn on whether I would use Java or LabVIEW to program a FIRST robot. Probably Java, now that I'm finishing up my CS degree and am very comfortable with OO paradigms. But if I'm working with students who still have much to learn, I like the intuitive nature of LabVIEW programs.