Historically LabView had two other key things going for it besides the low-entry-barrier of visual programming.
1. A GUI comes for free; in LabView each program is two windows, each variable you declare shows up once on your code DAG and then again on your GUI as a switch, text box, slider, etc.
2. National Instruments also had a set of libraries and PCI cards for communicating with lab equipment like benchtop power supplies, voltmeters, and even up to big complex kit like oscilloscopes and exotic telecom protocol emulators.
Those two things enabled people to easily wire up a motley assembly of benchtop instruments and orchestrate them together for a unified test of hardware like circuit boards and so on.
Nowadays EE types have better coding skills and those benchtop instruments all have Ethernet ports and REST API's.
But SpaceX famously uses LabView for some things, most notably for the Dragon flight console.
1. A GUI comes for free; in LabView each program is two windows, each variable you declare shows up once on your code DAG and then again on your GUI as a switch, text box, slider, etc.
2. National Instruments also had a set of libraries and PCI cards for communicating with lab equipment like benchtop power supplies, voltmeters, and even up to big complex kit like oscilloscopes and exotic telecom protocol emulators.
Those two things enabled people to easily wire up a motley assembly of benchtop instruments and orchestrate them together for a unified test of hardware like circuit boards and so on.
Nowadays EE types have better coding skills and those benchtop instruments all have Ethernet ports and REST API's.
But SpaceX famously uses LabView for some things, most notably for the Dragon flight console.