Stack Exchange

[alexgieg]

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@SeanJ wrote:
I think it is important to have a LabVIEW presence on stack exchange as it helps bring more people into the LabVIEW eco-system who are aware of the forums.

On a side note, IMHO the way to make LabVIEW more popular among developers in general would be for the the IDE to be free.

I don't mean the parts that actually make LabVIEW valuable to engineers and scientists, such as the advanced mathematical tools, the ability to access data acquisition and industrial devices (even NI's own) etc. I mean the bare bones G language and the ability to build basic executable applications that could run from a "G core runtime" much smaller than the full runtimes we currently have.

LabVIEW would then begin growing as a general purpose language and developing an ecosystem of non-engineering-related third-party libraries that the paid versions could also benefit from.

As long as even the most basic version costs money very few people will take it when there are hundreds of free languages running on dozens of free compilers out there.

StackExchange and other forums' LabVIEW reference would then grow from that organic popularity rather than having to be planned and executed in an effort to drive its popularity up.

I'd love to see NI take that route, but I don't think it likely in the short to medium run -- if ever.

[Terry_ALE]

This is very interesting thread and I plan to go onto SO and SE.

I don't think NI AEs should support SE or SO. The community of power users should be able to.

I totally agree. NI's model has gotten them this far but to really break into other users, they need to change. And though their l response may be that there is the home and editions, that is still not free. There is something about free that will tickle users into getting into using LabVIEW.

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@Terry_ALE wrote:

I totally agree. NI's model has gotten them this far but to really break into other users, they need to change. And though their l response may be that there is the home and editions, that is still not free. There is something about free that will tickle users into getting into using LabVIEW.

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Your preaching to the choir... It's not up to us.

[marshaul]

Stackexchange has pretty much jumped the shark in the last couple of years. After the last couple times I posted well-researched, well-posed and interesting questions I had struggled with for quite some time, and then spent quite a bit of time preparing the question, only to have it summarily closed for the most arbitrary and subjective reasons (e.g. supposed guideline violations that only applied if you skimmed and didn't grok the question, declared by high-rep users who were nevertheless way out their depth, yet still pretending they had something to contribute), I realized that I was beginning to dread the prospect of asking on SE. The last time, I simply deleted my question and asked it on a forum, and got a helpful response in short order.

At this point, SE is basically linkedin for un(der)employed programmers and CSS wranglers. 

If NI wanted to make labview more popular, the single biggest thing they could do is lower the price. Given that basically every other language can be adopted for free (at least, just to write and compile code), and given the amazingly low acceptance/completion rate of feature requests, it's really difficult to imagine choosing labview for a new system, in 2018. I suspect if we could see their figures we'd learn that their user base is dominated by legacy applications.

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@marshaul wrote: 

I suspect if we could see their figures we'd learn that their user base is dominated by legacy applications.

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I get the sentiment. I doubt that it is true though.

We start new projects all the time...

And even if this is true, I bet most C\C++ projects are legacy too. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it means the language stands the test of time... If there where no legacy projects, and no new projects, then the language is simply obsolete. Only a new languages have no legacy...

The longer a language exists, the more legacy there is. So it seems pretty natural to have more legacy then new projects at some point... I still doubt it's like that for LabVIEW at this time.

[billko]

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@marshaul wrote:

Stackexchange has pretty much jumped the shark in the last couple of years. After the last couple times I posted well-researched, well-posed and interesting questions I had struggled with for quite some time, and then spent quite a bit of time preparing the question, only to have it summarily closed for the most arbitrary and subjective reasons (e.g. supposed guideline violations that only applied if you skimmed and didn't grok the question, declared by high-rep users who were nevertheless way out their depth, yet still pretending they had something to contribute), I realized that I was beginning to dread the prospect of asking on SE. The last time, I simply deleted my question and asked it on a forum, and got a helpful response in short order.

At this point, SE is basically linkedin for un(der)employed programmers and CSS wranglers. 

If NI wanted to make labview more popular, the single biggest thing they could do is lower the price. Given that basically every other language can be adopted for free (at least, just to write and compile code), and given the amazingly low acceptance/completion rate of feature requests, it's really difficult to imagine choosing labview for a new system, in 2018. I suspect if we could see their figures we'd learn that their user base is dominated by legacy applications.

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What do you consider "low"?  there are occasions when I've seen more than ten requested features incorporated into a single release, and, ratio-wise, over half of the new incorporated features have been requested.

[marshaul]

I consider "not a single feature request I've been interested in has ever been filled in the entire time I've been using LabVIEW" to be "low". Maybe I just have bad luck, or want stupid things. But it doesn't do me much good, either way. 

I can't speak for other developers, but I personally have completely stopped using LabVIEW for new projects. There is nothing it can do that I can't do faster and, if I'm being honest, more reliably in Python, and frankly above a certain level of complexity the Python code will be easier to follow. Most amazingly, my Python code is generally faster, too, even when I directly transcribe existing LabVIEW code. I just can't fathom a single reason to start a new project committing to this degree of lock-in. It honestly kind of boggles the mind what the plan here is.