i program in labview daily, and it's always a little disappointing to see this same dumb picture posted all the time in reference to labview and visual programming. NO respectable labview programmer would work like that. you could make the same argument for text-based languages as well, as i have seen some atrociously formatted code in addition to poorly structured code.
one of the main issues with labview is that people simply don't take it seriously as a programming language. if people watched how i work everyday, i work just the same as, if not more efficient than, a good text-based programmer.
it's always a little disappointing to see this same dumb picture posted all the time in reference to labview
Yup. It's not unlike the -insert whatever language here (C++ being a good choice)-haters ranting but not actually having used it a lot, or at all.
Moreover: depending on the type of UI, I don't think there is any language out there which can get me the results I need as fast, when I need something 'process control'-like, i.e. lot of display of e.g. electrical signals and a bunch of control buttons/textboxes/comboboxes. Then there is just no match for Labview. And I have quite some experience with writing UIs in WinForms/WPF/Qt... (typical example: good luck writing a pannable, zoomable, cursor-able live multisignal 2D graph in any of those - with labview you just feed data into the premade component and you're done) It even goes so far that even though the backend is in C++ or Python, I might take the overhead of writing IPC between backend and Labview frontend over doing the UI in the backend language.
I've also done labview and have to agree that the picture is a bit extreme. Even so, extract the bottom left corner of that picture for something a bit cleaner and more representative of code in the wild but it's still completely impossible to see wtf is going on there.
If you hadn't had a chance to check out Labview NXG, I suggest it. 2.0 Beta is out now. Completely new editor experience. (Full disclosure, work on the core NXG team)
one of the main issues with labview is that people simply don't take it seriously as a programming language. if people watched how i work everyday, i work just the same as, if not more efficient than, a good text-based programmer.