{"id":2719,"date":"2013-04-05T22:46:16","date_gmt":"2013-04-06T05:46:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/?p=2719"},"modified":"2026-03-03T09:23:52","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T15:23:52","slug":"religious-about-labview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/2013\/04\/religious-about-labview","title":{"rendered":"Religious about LabVIEW"},"content":{"rendered":"

I realized this week at the CLA Summit that I am religious about LabVIEW. What does this mean? It means that despite conflicting evidence and statements made by individuals about the strengths and weaknesses of LabVIEW (including key individuals within NI), I have made a choice long ago to have faith in LabVIEW. Faith that LabVIEW executables can perform as efficiently and as stable as other main-stream programming languages. Faith that the development and debugging productivity in LabVIEW outweighs any negatives one might experience using a relatively unknown language with a much smaller user base and 3rd party tool support. Faith that, although it may not be trivial, just about any significant feature or functionality can be implemented in LabVIEW that can be implemented in other languages. Faith that LabVIEW can interoperate with other languages when needed, albeit sometimes with additional coding required. Faith that someday the Computer Science community will accept it as a serious contender in the world of general purpose programming languages that provides excellent support for massively parallel systems.<\/p>\n

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the CLA Summit like I always do, I heard several remarks\"CLA<\/a> from key people, both from NI and power users within the CLA community that in reality LabVIEW does not met these expectations. Its compiled code does not execute as efficiently as other compilers. Its memory use is not as efficient as other languages because they haven\u2019t been able to eliminate all redundant copies. There are plenty of user interface deficiencies that make it [near] impossible to provide user experiences that users have come to expect as standard features. In short, LabVIEW is still just an engineering tool intended to make it easy for scientists and engineers to interface with hardware.<\/p>\n

What do I do with this information? Just writing this post makes me feel like I am going against everything I have worked so hard to advocate for since I fell in love with LabVIEW in the late 90s. Should I abandon LabVIEW, or at least stop evangelizing LabVIEW as the tool that will revolutionize software engineering in the 21st century?<\/p>\n

It makes sense that I would be religious about LabVIEW given that God has already told me that he has a plan for graphical programming. (God\u2019s vision for graphical programming<\/a>) I believe the Lord does want to use graphical programming to make the world a better place, and LabVIEW is the leader in graphical programming. I believe I am walking in his Will for me when I do great things with LabVIEW and aid its advancement and acceptance. It\u2019s not uncommon for God to give his children visions that are greater than what their current reality suggests is possible, so why should this be any different?<\/p>\n

This is also a major motivation for persevering in my current job which maintains one of the largest applications ever written in LabVIEW, and has been since the mid 90\u2019s. It\u2019s unfortunate that I don\u2019t get to start new development from scratch very often, so opportunities for incorporating new technologies or frameworks are few and far between. But this is one of the few jobs out there that uses LabVIEW as a general purpose programming language, and it\u2019s in the space industry. How cool is that!? The LabVIEW community needs these kinds of testimonies as an example of the flexibility, durability, and development efficiencies that can be achieved with the use of LabVIEW over a long period of time on large applications.<\/p>\n

Would I have more fun, learn more, earn more, or do more good for God\u2019s Kingdom in another job? Probably, and that\u2019s a struggle that I face. But I also believe that God has positioned me here for now, and the on-going success of our application is not assured. For the sake of God\u2019s will for graphical programming, I hope to see our application win some victories that will help ensure its future success. Then perhaps I\u2019ll feel free to begin new adventures. May the Lord accept my labor and perseverance as an offering pleasing to him, not an offering to LabVIEW.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s also remember that there are many factors to career satisfaction.\"Nate's<\/a> I\u2019m very fortunate to work with a wonderful team, some of whom are crazy enough to do P90X and Insanity with me every day at 5:15am, others play hacky sack with me during the day. Hacky sack is the best work break, ever: sunshine, stretching, lots of laughing. I work 2.5 miles from home so I can go home and help out with the kids whenever needed. I can have lunch with my kids on occasion. With Flex 40 I can pretty much arrive and leave when I like. DES is on the same block as work, which is sometimes handy for our foster parenting. We still like our house and neighborhood, and are still growing in our church. And on most days I get to do LabVIEW and LabVIEW is fun, fun, fun! And I get to help other people be successful in LabVIEW too.<\/p>\n

Life is good because God is good.\u00a0\u00a0And the grass isn\u2019t greener on the other side, it\u2019s greener where you water it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realized this week at the CLA Summit that I am religious about LabVIEW. What does this mean? It means that despite conflicting evidence and statements made by individuals about the strengths and weaknesses of LabVIEW (including key individuals within NI), I have made a choice long ago to have faith in LabVIEW. Faith that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15,212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-labview","category-nate-2","wpcat-15-id","wpcat-212-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p504YJ-HR","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":954,"url":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/labview-exceptions-a-paradigm-shift-to-error-handling-in-labview","url_meta":{"origin":2719,"position":0},"title":"LabVIEW Exceptions: a paradigm shift to error handling in LabVIEW","author":"Nate","date":"December 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a presentation I gave to about 40 Certified LabVIEW Architects back in March 2010\u00a0at the\u00a0CLA Summit in Austin, TX.\u00a0 It presents some ideas on ways in which exception handling error techniques that are used in C++ and Java could be incorporated into LabVIEW by National Instruments, and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "LabVIEW"","block_context":{"text":"LabVIEW","link":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/cat\/labview"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10582,"url":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/2018\/03\/labview-tortoise-or-hare","url_meta":{"origin":2719,"position":1},"title":"LabVIEW – Tortoise or Hare","author":"Nate","date":"March 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Attached are the slides presented by Nate Moehring on Sept 19th, 2017 at the Certified LabVIEW Architect Summit on best practices for managing performance risks associated with LabVIEW applications that handle large amounts of data, as well as advanced tips and tricks for writing high performance LabVIEW code. LabVIEW -\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "LabVIEW"","block_context":{"text":"LabVIEW","link":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/cat\/labview"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10578,"url":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/2018\/03\/unit-testing-in-labview","url_meta":{"origin":2719,"position":2},"title":"Unit Testing in LabVIEW","author":"Nate","date":"March 4, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Attached are the slides and example project presented by Nate Moehring during the March 1st, 2018 presentation at the LabVIEW Architect Forum on advanced tips and tricks for writing unit tests in LabVIEW.\u00a0 Some justification is provided for unit testing in general, but most of the presentation covers the advanced\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "LabVIEW"","block_context":{"text":"LabVIEW","link":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/cat\/labview"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":951,"url":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/new-blog-category-labview","url_meta":{"origin":2719,"position":3},"title":"New blog category: LabVIEW","author":"Nate","date":"December 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Future of LabVIEW","rel":"","context":"In "LabVIEW"","block_context":{"text":"LabVIEW","link":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/cat\/labview"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.themoehrings.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/68a47da47f1a03454aa98e84b3420c5f.jpeg?fit=800%2C200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.themoehrings.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/68a47da47f1a03454aa98e84b3420c5f.jpeg?fit=800%2C200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.themoehrings.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/68a47da47f1a03454aa98e84b3420c5f.jpeg?fit=800%2C200&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.themoehrings.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/68a47da47f1a03454aa98e84b3420c5f.jpeg?fit=800%2C200&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1896,"url":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/2012\/03\/separating-user-interface-from-implementation-in-labview","url_meta":{"origin":2719,"position":4},"title":"Separating User Interface from Implementation in LabVIEW","author":"Nate","date":"March 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I had the opportunity to give the opening presentation at the 2012 Certified LabVIEW Architect on March 5th. \u00a0An expanded title \u00a0would be \"A Survey of Tools and Techniques for Separating the User Interface from Business Logic Implementation in LabVIEW\", but that doesn't fit on a slide very well. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "LabVIEW"","block_context":{"text":"LabVIEW","link":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/cat\/labview"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1684,"url":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/accessing-objects-by-reference-in-labvoop","url_meta":{"origin":2719,"position":5},"title":"Accessing Objects By Reference in LabVOOP","author":"Nate","date":"October 24, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"https:\/\/decibel.ni.c...\/docs\/DOC-18320 Motivation for this presentation: At the 2011 CLA Summit, National Instruments asked us what we thought was missing from LabVIEW or what needed to be improved. I already knew NI\u2019s position on this, but my feedback to NI and direct conversation with Stephen Mercer, father of LabVOOP, was that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "LabVIEW"","block_context":{"text":"LabVIEW","link":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/cat\/labview"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2719"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36388,"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions\/36388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themoehrings.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}