I Love LabVIEW: How I Came to Embrace the World’s Most Radical Programming “Language”
I’m going to go out and say it: LabVIEW is the most radical professional programming “language” in the world today. It’s so radical that many computer professionals think it’s a joke. My brother, who is an experienced electrical engineer, once suggested to me that I shouldn’t “waste my time” on LabVIEW because “it’s not a serious computer language”.
He later ate his words when I showed him how quickly I could create a complicated application that integrated several pieces of external hardware. “That would have taken me three times as long,” he said.
The first time I laid eyes on LabVIEW was in 2004 during my freshman year of college during a physics lab class. I didn’t even know I was looking at a computer programming language. I don’t think that the teaching assistant knew it either. The TA simply said “Open up LabVIEW on your computers. We’re going to use it to gather some data.” She then simply told us, step-by-step, every element and wire to drop onto the block diagram, without even explaining to us what a block diagram was. I’m not kidding—it felt like voodoo. Many of my fellow students got frustrated when it didn’t seem to work like we thought it should. “Why is the data on this graph scrolling to the side?!?!”, “Why does this number truncate everything after the decimal?”, etc.
Despite having no context of what LabVIEW was or how it worked, we started to get the hang of it as the weeks passed. I had what was probably a career-defining moment when we did an assignment that used a Fourier transform to perform a spectral analysis on a microphone signal. “I could use this to tune my guitar,” I thought. I felt a strong feeling of disappointment that I wasn’t allowed to take home the PXI chassis and its thousands of dollars’ worth of modules to my apartment.
As I continued my studies in Mechanical Engineering over the years, I felt a strong pull towards anything that involved computer programming and instrumentation. And, over the years, I gained a better understanding that LabVIEW is a complete, graphically-based programming language that engineers can use to do pretty much anything that they need to do.
LabVIEW has so many advantages over text-based languages. It can fit onto one screen what a text-based language would need several pages of text. I can look at someone else’s LabVIEW code and quickly understand what it does, whereas text-based code is often an indecipherable mess unless it is heavily commented. The wire-based structure of LabVIEW follows the “data-flow paradigm”, which makes it so much more intuitive to work with rather than the variable-based paradigm of text-based languages. Lastly, it is so easy to create user-interfaces in LabVIEW. Even though I was just an undergraduate student with little experience, I could create impressive applications for my class projects.
Later, I was able to use my love for LabVIEW to do research as a master’s student at Texas A&M Biomedical Engineering. After that, it was only natural for me to accept a job at National Instruments and to join their Vision and Motion applications support team. In 2015, I moved across the country to Pennsylvania and worked as a turn-key systems developer for Sciotex, one of the largest NI Alliance Partners in the USA that focuses on Industrial and Biomedical vision and motion applications.
In 2020, I moved to New Mexico to be closer to family. The future of LabVIEW started to look a little rocky after NI abandoned LabVIEW NXG, which was a newer version of LabVIEW that used vector graphics instead of pixel graphics. Even more disturbing was when it switched from perpetual licenses to subscription licenses, which threatened to push away loyal customers. I think LabVIEW users everywhere held their breaths when they heard that Emerson was purchasing NI, fearing that the new owners might disregard LabVIEW. However, our fears turned out to be unfounded—Emerson has shown a commitment to LabVIEW and perpetual licenses are back. They even added a zoom feature to the block diagram. Let’s be frank, long-time LabVIEW users don't give a care about the zoom feature, but I took it as a heartful gesture that Emerson was willing to continue to invest in LabVIEW and that it won’t be going away soon.
In 2024, I took the plunge and started my own LabVIEW consulting company. I was naturally very nervous about being accepted into the wider LabVIEW ecosystem and being able to attract enough customers to earn a living. You can’t imagine the joy I felt when I received an email that I was accepted to the NI Alliance Partner Program. I felt like it was an acknowledgement that I had something to offer to the world and that I would be able to keep doing the work that I love. I have started working with several clients and, although I’m still accepting new work, I am confident that my new business will be able to provide for my family.
It's just amazing to look back at the past twenty years and to see how I went from not even understanding what I was looking at on the computer screen to now owning a business that is partnered with NI. LabVIEW truly is the most radical computer programming language on the planet, and I love it. For the betterment of the worldwide field of engineering, may LabVIEW continue another twenty years…or even another hundred and twenty years!
