I have led the eviction of LabView from three different engineering organizations now. It’s seductive how easy you can get started with building a bench top system. Then it grows from there and pretty soon people are doing linear algebra and trying to automate tests by writing data into a database - screen after screen of multiply nested windows. It’s not pretty, it’s not fast (you need a much more powerful computer to run LabView than a comparable Visual C++ or Matlab program). It’s also very hard to document it well, really hard for a third party to bootstrap into your code base, doesn’t play well with common version management tools, requires a full license for every machine you run it on, and if your developer leaves, it can be hell to hire someone to maintain it - LabView consultants cost a mint and are hard to find.
We had a bake-off once, once you have the instrument control DLL’s and link them into Matlab, you can code up a new experiment in Matlab in about 10% of the time it takes to do the same thing in LabView. And from there, you can do pretty much anything that needs doing in terms of data work-up. I’m sure these days you could do the same in Python, which has become the new science and engineering language.
We had a bake-off once, once you have the instrument control DLL’s and link them into Matlab, you can code up a new experiment in Matlab in about 10% of the time it takes to do the same thing in LabView. And from there, you can do pretty much anything that needs doing in terms of data work-up. I’m sure these days you could do the same in Python, which has become the new science and engineering language.