Pros and cons of using Labview?

[Alan Anderson]

LabVIEW is mostly "a good fit for people with little to no programming experience" because it's harder to learn if you already think you know how to program. Almost everyone starts out learning to program using a procedural language like Java or Python. Some get into object-oriented programming and understand it well. But LabVIEW is different. It's a dataflow language, where the only thing keeping every little piece of the program from running all at once is the availability of the data each piece requires. If the only programming you know is the kind where execution happens in linear fashion down the page of text, LabVIEW is difficult to approach.

LabVIEW is just as easy to learn as any other first programming language. I personally think it's easier to write LabVIEW code, because syntax is enforced by the nature of the data flowing into and out of nodes, and typing errors are essentially nonexistent. I also find that it's easier to read, because you can get a good impression of what a section of code does by glancing at it as a whole rather than having to read the details of each line. But that's my personal experience, not a law of nature.

One big point in favor of LabVIEW is that it's the language used by the company which provides the robot control system.

Another plus for LabVIEW, at least in my experience, is that it's possible to have multiple people looking at the screen while someone edits the code, and everyone is likely to be able to follow along without getting lost. I think it's a very good environment for one or two "master" programmers and a collection of "apprentices".

Graphically drawing a program is perhaps not as quick as typing text if you are a great typist who knows exactly what you are doing. But if you aren't the hypothetical amazing C++ programmer, the power available to you in LabVIEW is likely to let you program as fast as you need to.

When developing or debugging, being able to run a program "interactively" with full access to the data values and any front-panel controls and indicators is a huge bonus for LabVIEW.

The few cons I can think of are:
* Building code takes a lot longer in LabVIEW than in C++ or Java.
* Source code isn't text, so it's not as convenient to discuss it in email or a web forum.
* Version control and file conflict resolution isn't as straightforward for a graphical language as it is for a text-based one.