What is LabVIEW?

We first released LabVIEW in 1986 as a graphical programming language on the Macintosh.  By now, you would think that we have a good idea of what it is.  However, as many of you know who are LabVIEW users – the product is constantly evolving (we like to think “improving”) over the years.  In fact, one of the most common misconceptions I hear from customers is when they tell me “I know all about LabVIEW… I used it in my lab in college 5 years ago.”  Inside, I am thinking – dude, you have no idea how much LabVIEW has changed in 5 years.  

The fact is that LabVIEW has evolved tremendously, particularly over the past few years.  We have great plans for LabVIEW – which go way beyond a simple programming language.  The challenge is how do we serve our good customers of today, while at the same time continue to evolve and improve the platform while they are using it?  I am reminded of an actual conversation I had with a few customers this year during lunch on Thursday of NIWeek.   I am reminded of it because, by Thursday – after a week of sales conference sessions, keynote presentations, and editor meetings, I usually try to keep my lunch open so I can sit at a random table to get some feedback from users – to be honest, its a way to get my feet back on the ground and in touch with reality again.  This year illustrated exactly our challenge.  I asked the group at the table “How do you use LabVIEW and what do you like about it?”  The first customer, from a big mil-aero account, said they are working on a large application with LabVIEW and, coming from a C programming background, they really liked the direction we were going in with the project, OO programming structures, and libraries to better serve the programmers of the world.  The second customer said “I use LabVIEW like a calculator to do quick and dirty things.  So keep it simple – I don’t need a lot of the new features you are building.”

So in an attempt to rest my brain and chat up some LabVIEW users, I was once again confronted with one of the ongoing challenges of the universe – how do we present a powerful programming language and a high-level engineering tool in one package?  The interesting thing was that both of these customers were basically happy – but they were using the product in completely different ways. 

This debate was stirred up recently in a great info-lv posting, started by David Moore (from Moore Good Ideas) who started the thread with a post entitled “Will LabVIEW survive?” – which was more about balancing quality and testing with innovation.  It is amazing how these user forums spark up some of the most passionate and thought-provoking debates among our users – usually involving people coming in on both sides of the issue.  While most of the posts and discussions are about “How do I do X in LV?” or “Does anybody have a driver for X?”, we sometimes see these great philosophical debates too.  In the ensuing discussion, Mark Smith from Sandia had a great response where he compared LV to an application for doing relatively simple things (like Excel) as well as an IDE for building applications, and that perhaps we should consider packaging LabVIEW differently based on all of the different features now baked into it.  We ARE constantly looking at new and different ways to package and explain LabVIEW for the world – but we have to be very careful because we have such a rich history behind us and we don’t want to mess things up.  So its a challenge – but perhaps a blog will help.  (If not, at least it will help me move forward on my master self-aggrandizement strategy!)

I am hoping to tap into some of these topics to keep the passion flowing from our users, and provide more of a dialog.  I am already breaking rule #1, which is don’t prattle on too long about something.  We’ll see how it goes.