The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

gac:
JakeyC:
I'd like to think that after all that, the output is just "Hello World".
That might be the intended output, but it'll almost definitely just crash until National Instruments have helped troubleshoot it over the phone and pointed out which non-documented bits of version-specific code you need to insert, and which as-yet-unreleased toolbox you need to install to make it work.

heheh been there done that, they have a very helpful forum where you can get that 'particular version of a dll to put into your gac to get your code to compile'. NI softwares really arent meant for mass deployemnt, they suck at that too. but if you need to get a complicated process coordinated, make tons of measurements, control your prodcution line hardware etc, NI has the thing for you

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Yair:
Some of the disadvantages:

Easy to get started with, so you get untrained users.

Automatic memory management, so your options of controlling memory allocations are limited. Might be an issue under some circumstances.

Writing parallel code is extremely easy. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to have lots and lots of race conditions.

Working with SCC is a big issue, although recent versions of LabVIEW have improved this somewhat. Basic work (check in, check out, commit, update) is not much of an issue, but diffing and merging are. Again, this is not necessarily an issue, depending on your needs.

GUIs look like shit. All those controls that are supposed to look like rocker switches, dials and LEDs just look awful and unprofessional.
Is a proprietary language owned by National Instruments, meaning that it's very difficult to do anything with LabVIEW code without buying LabVIEW from NI. If NI disappear, all that LabVIEW code will be practically useless (especially since recent versions of LabVIEW require online activation).
Is a nightmare to upgrade when NI crap out a new version and pretty much impossible to downgrade to an earlier version.

Yazeran · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

iToad:
Unfortunately, most LabVIEW code is written by end users, not programmers. I just inherited a pile of literal spahegetti code from the original author to see if I could clean it up, and eliminate a bunch of race conditions and a mysterious latch-up problem.
One of the first things that I did was create a concurrent state machine description of the logic, and a text-based specification of what all of the sub VIs did. The original developer was astonished. He didn't realize that you could actually design the software before writing it. I also introduced him to comments.

Moral of the story: Inheriting a large, badly written VBA application is bad. Inheriting a large, badly written LabVIEW application is very bad.

Amen!

I have also heard a lot of people saying LabView is soo good: 'you can just take your instrument and within a few minutes get a graph of what it is measuring'. All well and good, but add some 20 different devices (of some 5 to 10 different types) and all of a sudden you end up with some spahgetti like the one shown. My beef is that you still can't get a screen big enough that you can properly debug any LabView program doing anything remotely interesting. Add to that some interesting race conditions and you are set for disaster....

I would prefer a program written in C anytime over Labview, as in C at least you know exactly in which order things get executed, and in my experience, in 99% of the time you never need to do things asynchronous anyways. If your application/problem requires that, then it gets more complicated, but then Labview may not be your choice regardless....

Yours Yazeran

Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

So you've filched Microsoft's plans for the Zune replacement, impressive.

Nagesh · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

boog:
Nagesh:
boog:
frits:
At what point does this kind of stuff get offensive to actual Indians?
Kind of a tree falling in the woods question, don't you think? If someone insults India and no actual Indians are around to hear it, are they offended?
I am Indian only.
That's highly unlikely.

Why you think that booger boy?

Nagesh · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

boog:
Nagesh:
boog:
frits:
Harold III:
Windows 98? Thanks, that explains a lot, Nagesh. Why don't you come back when your people decrease by a couple of worlds?
At what point does this kind of stuff get offensive to actual Indians?
Kind of a tree falling in the woods question, don't you think? If someone insults India and no actual Indians are around to hear it, are they offended?

मादरचोद, तुम खुद को क्या सम्ह्जते हो?
मैं माफी चाहता हूँ. मैं हिंदी बोलते नहीं.

Itis "Bolta" and not "Boltey", dumbass. Get better kwality of Indian person to translete.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Richard:
Incidentally, I have the interesting problem of an NI4462 card which was sold to me a few months ago as being "supported on Linux". This support uses a nasty binary blob kernel driver that is only available for distros about 4 years old (eg Mandrake 2008). Not impressed

TRWTF is absence of stable kernel driver APIs in Linux.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

BentFranklin:
In that Snopes article, they twice refer to 100% oxygen atmosphere. Really? 100%? That doesn't seem right. Anyone know this for sure?

Wikepedia says it's so (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1), and the references back it up. Seems NASA chose 100% oxygen atmosphere to avoid some of the problems with high-nitrogen atmosphere. Once out of the earth's atmosphere they dropped the pressure to 5 psi, but on the launch pad they pressurized the capsule to just above 1 atm.

frink · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

About 15 years ago (during college) I worked for National instruments as a tech support telephone jockey.

The real WTF is not LabVIEW it's academics who think because they have spent ages learning about something really obscure which no one else knows (or cares) about, that means they are really smart and have the right to patronise everyone else.

Also because they are so smart the problem must be with whatever they are using because it couldn't possibly be their fault because they're so smart.

filed under: The O/S is broken.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

On the subject on user interface, I give you National Instruments own User Interface Gallery. These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition.

[image]

Hmmmm....Windows 95 style.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

BentFranklin:
In that Snopes article, they twice refer to 100% oxygen atmosphere. Really? 100%? That doesn't seem right. Anyone know this for sure?

Yes, they really did use a 100% oxygen atmosphere! But not at 14 PSI (about 1 atm). Instead, it was at 5 PSI. That's the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level; you can do just fine without all the nitrogen that normally buffers it, and the fire hazard at 5PSI of oxygen is not really any worse than at 14PSI of air. It saves a hell of a lot of mass, though, and for Apollo, that was a very big deal. The idea was they'd start out at 14 PSI, so nobody'd get the bends or anything, and then bleed off cabin atmosphere until it was down to 5 PSI, which they'd stick with for the rest of the mission.

Then Apollo 1 happened. On the ground, with only oxygen available to pressurize, they went up to more than sea level pressure in order to fully test all of the systems and simulate the pressure differential the capsule would experience in space against a vacuum. Basically, it was a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and also a massive fire risk. After that, they changed so that when pressurizing to sea level on the ground, the oxygen was buffered with nitrogen, before dropping down to 5 PSI pure oxygen for the bulk of the mission.

The Space Shuttle is, I believe, the first American spacecraft to have a nitrogen/oxygen atsmophere at 14 PSI for the entire mission, though they used to drop to 10 PSI during spacewalks, to make it easier for the spacewalkers to purge nitrogen from their blood. That's the other upshot of a 5PSI pure oxygen environment -- it makes EVA prep a lot easier, because your body has already gotten rid of all that nitrogen. (Suits are still at 5PSI pure oxygen -- any more pressure and you can't bend them.)

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

undefined:
Boris Vladamir:
Дизайн то, что является надежной, и мир будет просто производить лучше дурак.

You can not to use on-line automatic translation to produce correct russian sentences.

There are no middle names in Russian, we use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic#Russian

Key attribute of Russia: it is big country. All is not Moscow Russian. Please try to get facts straight before posting attempting to spoil my good name.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
On the subject on user interface, I give you National Instruments own User Interface Gallery. These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition. [image]
Hmmmm....Windows 95 style.

Tihs is not bad. I am to be using latest release of Sun Java 1.3 next month. Swing is not be be suporting the non-aliasing of fonts. I am to very impressing with level of detail on these grafts. 3D wijets are not to be a turned-on for you?

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Calli Arcale:
BentFranklin:
Question?
Facts.

Neat, thanks!

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
5. GUIs look like shit. All those controls that are supposed to look like rocker switches, dials and LEDs just look awful and unprofessional. 6. Is a proprietary language owned by National Instruments, meaning that it's very difficult to do anything with LabVIEW code without buying LabVIEW from NI. If NI disappear, all that LabVIEW code will be practically useless (especially since recent versions of LabVIEW require online activation). 7. Is a nightmare to upgrade when NI crap out a new version and pretty much impossible to downgrade to an earlier version.

My GUIs don't look like that. If you know what you're doing, you can create much better GUIs, but that is indeed one of the areas where LabVIEW needs considerable improvement.

Yes, it's proprietary. If NI disappears (which currently seems unlikely based on their financial reports), the LabVIEW source code is in escrow and will go to another body. Existing LabVIEW versions will continue to work. That's no different that using visual studio and .NET.

I'm sure upgrading from VB6 to VB.NET was very easy for you? Or from SQL Server 2000 to 2008? Some upgrades go smoothly, others do not. Mine were generally smooth - open the code, find new bugs (if any), build the application.

As I said earlier, those were some advantages and disadvantages, not all.

boog · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Itis "Bolta" and not "Boltey", dumbass. Get better kwality of Indian person to translete.

Likewise.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Calli Arcale:
BentFranklin:
In that Snopes article, they twice refer to 100% oxygen atmosphere. Really? 100%? That doesn't seem right. Anyone know this for sure?

Yes, they really did use a 100% oxygen atmosphere! But not at 14 PSI (about 1 atm). Instead, it was at 5 PSI. That's the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level; you can do just fine without all the nitrogen that normally buffers it, and the fire hazard at 5PSI of oxygen is not really any worse than at 14PSI of air. It saves a hell of a lot of mass, though, and for Apollo, that was a very big deal. The idea was they'd start out at 14 PSI, so nobody'd get the bends or anything, and then bleed off cabin atmosphere until it was down to 5 PSI, which they'd stick with for the rest of the mission.

Then Apollo 1 happened. On the ground, with only oxygen available to pressurize, they went up to more than sea level pressure in order to fully test all of the systems and simulate the pressure differential the capsule would experience in space against a vacuum. Basically, it was a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and also a massive fire risk. After that, they changed so that when pressurizing to sea level on the ground, the oxygen was buffered with nitrogen, before dropping down to 5 PSI pure oxygen for the bulk of the mission.

The Space Shuttle is, I believe, the first American spacecraft to have a nitrogen/oxygen atsmophere at 14 PSI for the entire mission, though they used to drop to 10 PSI during spacewalks, to make it easier for the spacewalkers to purge nitrogen from their blood. That's the other upshot of a 5PSI pure oxygen environment -- it makes EVA prep a lot easier, because your body has already gotten rid of all that nitrogen. (Suits are still at 5PSI pure oxygen -- any more pressure and you can't bend them.)

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

boog · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
boog:
Nagesh:
I am Indian only.
That's highly unlikely.
Why you think that booger boy?

Why not?

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition. [image]

No, they aren't. That's a document listing some of the control types you can find in LabVIEW (the majority of which I personally don't like and don't use as-is).

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

I used to program LabVIEW for a living. While I was stuck doing that I made this demotivator: [image]

It's possible to write structured code in LabVIEW, but the IDE makes it difficult. The simple act of defining a new function (in LabVIEW parlance, creating a VI) is kind of a pain in the ass, especially compared to every other programming language.

Kuba · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
Yair:
Some of the disadvantages:

Easy to get started with, so you get untrained users.

Automatic memory management, so your options of controlling memory allocations are limited. Might be an issue under some circumstances.

Writing parallel code is extremely easy. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to have lots and lots of race conditions.

Working with SCC is a big issue, although recent versions of LabVIEW have improved this somewhat. Basic work (check in, check out, commit, update) is not much of an issue, but diffing and merging are. Again, this is not necessarily an issue, depending on your needs.

GUIs look like shit. All those controls that are supposed to look like rocker switches, dials and LEDs just look awful and unprofessional.

Is a proprietary language owned by National Instruments, meaning that it's very difficult to do anything with LabVIEW code without buying LabVIEW from NI. If NI disappear, all that LabVIEW code will be practically useless (especially since recent versions of LabVIEW require online activation).

Is a nightmare to upgrade when NI crap out a new version and pretty much impossible to downgrade to an earlier version.

It's worse than that. The graphical notation used in LabView is patented to hell and back. Even if you wanted to do a clean-room reimplementation simply to provide a 2nd-vendor fallback for your investment in your own VIs, you couldn't. Good luck licensing anything from NI, haha.

Nagesh · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Boris Vladamir:
undefined:
Boris Vladamir:
Дизайн то, что является надежной, и мир будет просто производить лучше дурак.

You can not to use on-line automatic translation to produce correct russian sentences.

There are no middle names in Russian, we use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic#Russian
Key attribute of Russia: it is big country. All is not Moscow Russian. Please try to get facts straight before posting attempting to spoil my good name.

VLADIMIR IS NOT SOUNDING LIKE REAL NAME.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Boris Vladamir:
undefined:
Boris Vladamir:
Дизайн то, что является надежной, и мир будет просто производить лучше дурак.

You can not to use on-line automatic translation to produce correct russian sentences.

There are no middle names in Russian, we use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic#Russian
Key attribute of Russia: it is big country. All is not Moscow Russian. Please try to get facts straight before posting attempting to spoil my good name.

VLADIMIR IS NOT SOUNDING LIKE REAL NAME.

So sorry we cannot all be from 3rd-world country made up of the offspring of Englishmen and primates.

Nagesh · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Boris Vladamir:
Nagesh:
Boris Vladamir:
undefined:
Boris Vladamir:
Дизайн то, что является надежной, и мир будет просто производить лучше дурак.

You can not to use on-line automatic translation to produce correct russian sentences.

There are no middle names in Russian, we use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic#Russian
Key attribute of Russia: it is big country. All is not Moscow Russian. Please try to get facts straight before posting attempting to spoil my good name.

VLADIMIR IS NOT SOUNDING LIKE REAL NAME.
So sorry we cannot all be from 3rd-world country made up of the offspring of Englishmen and primates.

Russia pepole are children born of much raping from mongol warlords. So don't talk about ancestory to me, madarchod.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

This. Absolutely this. I'm working with a Labview program that I inherited from my predecessor. The block diagram only has a few blocks and is fairly clean... ...until you notice that each block is a sub VI with over 35 blocks in each (and some of those are sub-VI's as well). All told, there's just shy of 400 sub-VI's, all nested within each other. A few of the sub-VI's are on a network drive that's physically across the nation, so the program even manages to create quasi race condition failures, which is really a difficult way to mess up. I'd almost prefer the spaghetti because it looks messy, so it's easier to argue for a chance to switch. sigh

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Yair:
Anon:
These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition. [image]

No, they aren't. That's a document listing some of the control types you can find in LabVIEW (the majority of which I personally don't like and don't use as-is).

NI called it a "gallery," the whole point of a gallery is to show what you can do.

I would expect to find these on some l33t winamp sk1nz, the fact that NI has them at all is embarrassing.

But hey, while you're defending the indefensible, it's time for the classic UI game, "are these switches on or off?"

[image] [image]

I thought LabView was useful for some tasks, but this is garbage. I mean, I'll listen to reasoned support, but don't put your balls in my mouth and tell me it's tea-time.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Meep:
Yair:
Anon:
These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition. [image]

No, they aren't. That's a document listing some of the control types you can find in LabVIEW (the majority of which I personally don't like and don't use as-is).

NI called it a "gallery," the whole point of a gallery is to show what you can do.

I would expect to find these on some l33t winamp sk1nz, the fact that NI has them at all is embarrassing.

But hey, while you're defending the indefensible, it's time for the classic UI game, "are these switches on or off?"
[image] [image]
I thought LabView was useful for some tasks, but this is garbage. I mean, I'll listen to reasoned support, but don't put your balls in my mouth and tell me it's tea-time.

I am very to be impresed with quality of these first-grade ui elements. Can you plz send me the codes to integrate into UI elements?

Nagesh · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Nagesh (fake):
Meep:
Yair:
Anon:
These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition. [image]

No, they aren't. That's a document listing some of the control types you can find in LabVIEW (the majority of which I personally don't like and don't use as-is).

NI called it a "gallery," the whole point of a gallery is to show what you can do.

I would expect to find these on some l33t winamp sk1nz, the fact that NI has them at all is embarrassing.

But hey, while you're defending the indefensible, it's time for the classic UI game, "are these switches on or off?"
[image] [image]
I thought LabView was useful for some tasks, but this is garbage. I mean, I'll listen to reasoned support, but don't put your balls in my mouth and tell me it's tea-time.
I am very to be impresed with quality of these first-grade ui elements. Can you plz send me the codes to integrate into UI elements?

Stop making annoy me, madarchod!

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Nagesh (fake):
Meep:
Yair:
Anon:
These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition. [image]

No, they aren't. That's a document listing some of the control types you can find in LabVIEW (the majority of which I personally don't like and don't use as-is).

NI called it a "gallery," the whole point of a gallery is to show what you can do.

I would expect to find these on some l33t winamp sk1nz, the fact that NI has them at all is embarrassing.

But hey, while you're defending the indefensible, it's time for the classic UI game, "are these switches on or off?"
[image] [image]
I thought LabView was useful for some tasks, but this is garbage. I mean, I'll listen to reasoned support, but don't put your balls in my mouth and tell me it's tea-time.
I am very to be impresed with quality of these first-grade ui elements. Can you plz send me the codes to integrate into UI elements?

Stop making annoy me, madarchod!

Madarchod this, madarchod that. Don't you know any other Hindi swear words?

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Charles:
...until you notice that each block is a sub VI with over 35 blocks in each (and some of those are sub-VI's as well). All told, there's just shy of 400 sub-VI's, all nested within each other

You do realize that splitting your code into small, manageable and cohesive chunks is generally considered a good thing, right? That small functions that do specific things are better than a single big function that does everything? That splitting things into classes can make your code safer and easier to read?

From your basic description, it sounds like the app you're working on at least doesn't have the problem described in the original post.

Personally, most of my apps have considerably more than 400 VIs. What's the problem with that?

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Meep:
...But hey, while you're defending the indefensible...I'll listen to reasoned support, but don't put your balls in my mouth and tell me it's tea-time.

Congratulations, you've pushed me past of the point of "this is as much time as I'm willing to spend on this today". You seem to not have noticed how I said that I don't like these controls either and how my LabVIEW GUIs don't usually look like this.

Captain Oblivious · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

frink:
About 15 years ago (during college) I worked for National instruments as a tech support telephone jockey.
The real WTF is not LabVIEW it's academics who think because they have spent ages learning about something really obscure which no one else knows (or cares) about, that means they are really smart and have the right to patronise everyone else.

Also because they are so smart the problem must be with whatever they are using because it couldn't possibly be their fault because they're so smart.

filed under: The O/S is broken.

Sounds like every "developer" I have ever met.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

[quote user="Yair"][quote user="Anon"] Yes, it's proprietary. If NI disappears (which currently seems unlikely based on their financial reports), the LabVIEW source code is in escrow and will go to another body. Existing LabVIEW versions will continue to work. That's no different that using visual studio and .NET. [/quote]

Except I can open my .cs files in Notepad. Try that with your .vi documents. Even if Microsoft exploded tomorrow and every copy of Visual Studio disappeared from the face of the earth, I'd still be able to look at my source code and see what it did. Even if it was impossible to compile it again, I could still look at it and piece together the functionality.

Also, I'm sure people working at Enron thought it was highly unlikely that they'd go out-of-business. Stuff happens, companies collapse, sometimes very suddenly.

HellKarnassus · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Grant:
Nagesh:
Nagesh (fake):
Meep:
Yair:
Anon:
These are the examples that NI think are beautiful enough that they need special recognition. [image]

No, they aren't. That's a document listing some of the control types you can find in LabVIEW (the majority of which I personally don't like and don't use as-is).

NI called it a "gallery," the whole point of a gallery is to show what you can do.

I would expect to find these on some l33t winamp sk1nz, the fact that NI has them at all is embarrassing.

But hey, while you're defending the indefensible, it's time for the classic UI game, "are these switches on or off?"
[image] [image]
I thought LabView was useful for some tasks, but this is garbage. I mean, I'll listen to reasoned support, but don't put your balls in my mouth and tell me it's tea-time.
I am very to be impresed with quality of these first-grade ui elements. Can you plz send me the codes to integrate into UI elements?

Stop making annoy me, madarchod!
Madarchod this, madarchod that. Don't you know any other Hindi swear words?

Nageshchod!

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
Yair:
Yes, it's proprietary. If NI disappears (which currently seems unlikely based on their financial reports), the LabVIEW source code is in escrow and will go to another body. Existing LabVIEW versions will continue to work. That's no different that using visual studio and .NET.

Except I can open my .cs files in Notepad. Try that with your .vi documents. Even if Microsoft exploded tomorrow and every copy of Visual Studio disappeared from the face of the earth, I'd still be able to look at my source code and see what it did. Even if it was impossible to compile it again, I could still look at it and piece together the functionality.

Also, I'm sure people working at Enron thought it was highly unlikely that they'd go out-of-business. Stuff happens, companies collapse, sometimes very suddenly.

That is probably worst argument against LabVIEW that you could make.

Also, what is "appelatio"? GINMF :(

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

No-one has yet touched on the reason idiots like me buy NI stuff: Single, direct seller.

If I start off with a simple data acquisition task, I know that the acquisition hardware, drivers and development environment all came from NI, so it's just one ass to kick if there's a problem. The sales rep can access the actual engineers to sort problems.

This is very different to many re-sellers, who have 2000 Chinese made boards to sell, and cannot access any in-depth engineering expertise.

If I need to add 422 coms, or vision acquisition, boards from NI play nice with each other and the drivers. I do not want to go back 20 years when adding a new board would require a compiler version incompatible with an existing board from a different vendor.

I agree 100% about the horribleness of Labview though.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

BentFranklin:
In that Snopes article, they twice refer to 100% oxygen atmosphere. Really? 100%? That doesn't seem right. Anyone know this for sure?

It was in at least some of the early tests. That was reportedly one of the reasons for the Appollo 1 capsule fire.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
Except I can open my .cs files in Notepad. Try that with your .vi documents. Even if Microsoft exploded tomorrow and every copy of Visual Studio disappeared from the face of the earth, I'd still be able to look at my source code and see what it did. Even if it was impossible to compile it again, I could still look at it and piece together the functionality.

Congratulations, your reply was ridiculous enough for me to rise back past the point I previously passed.

So, to counter: Even if NI exploded tomorrow and all backup copies of the LabVIEW source code were stolen and eaten by alien zombies and whoever holds the LabVIEW source code in escrow would turn out to be a Bond villain, my existing copies of LabVIEW would still allow me to look at my source code and see what it does. And I would even be able to compile it. So yay, I'm basically prepared for that unlikely scenario.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Yair:
Anon:
Except I can open my .cs files in Notepad. Try that with your .vi documents. Even if Microsoft exploded tomorrow and every copy of Visual Studio disappeared from the face of the earth, I'd still be able to look at my source code and see what it did. Even if it was impossible to compile it again, I could still look at it and piece together the functionality.

Congratulations, your reply was ridiculous enough for me to rise back past the point I previously passed.

So, to counter: Even if NI exploded tomorrow and all backup copies of the LabVIEW source code were stolen and eaten by alien zombies and whoever holds the LabVIEW source code in escrow would turn out to be a Bond villain, my existing copies of LabVIEW would still allow me to look at my source code and see what it does. And I would even be able to compile it. So yay, I'm basically prepared for that unlikely scenario.

Until your HD crashes, and you find you can't reinstall LabVIEW because it requires online activation and the servers aren't running post-apocalypse.

Of course it isn't likely, but why even take the risk? You can write your programs in BASIC, C, C++, C#, Java,...just about any other language, and none of them have this problem. You can pick almost any other language in the world and not have your source code, the single most important thing a programmer produces, held hostage.

Man, it's alarming how much the LabVIEW fan boys are in denial about this.

Matt Westwood · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Boris Vladamir:
undefined:
Boris Vladamir:
Дизайн то, что является надежной, и мир будет просто производить лучше дурак.

You can not to use on-line automatic translation to produce correct russian sentences.

There are no middle names in Russian, we use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic#Russian
Key attribute of Russia: it is big country. All is not Moscow Russian. Please try to get facts straight before posting attempting to spoil my good name.

If you were really Russian you'd spell it Vladimir, before or after transliteration.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

You are in a maze of twisty little macros, all alike

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

FatBigot:
...stuff...

Am I the only one at first sight read his name as BigFaggot?

Sorry, I'm done adding absoutely nothing to this thread...

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Boris Vladamir:
Nagesh:
VLADIMIR IS NOT SOUNDING LIKE REAL NAME.
So sorry we cannot all be from 3rd-world country made up of the offspring of Englishmen and primates.

Why be sorry? It's just a fact of life that not everyone is able to share your Carnivore ancestry.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Boris Vladamir:
undefined:
Boris Vladamir:
Дизайн то, что является надежной, и мир будет просто производить лучше дурак.

You can not to use on-line automatic translation to produce correct russian sentences.

There are no middle names in Russian, we use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic#Russian
Key attribute of Russia: it is big country. All is not Moscow Russian. Please try to get facts straight before posting attempting to spoil my good name.

If you were really Russian you'd spell it Vladimir, before or after transliteration.

If you were really Hebrew, you would spell it "Levi".

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
Of course it isn't likely, but why even take the risk?

Because the risk is so negligent it's irrelevant and I prefer programming in LabVIEW. I like it better. It works better for me and I'm not going to not use it because it's proprietary and there's some far-fetched option in which everything goes to pieces and yet I really, really, REALLY need my source code and can't get at it. If the situation is that bad, I assure you that access to my code would be the least of my issues. So, yes, I am in denial about that. It's a "problem" I have no problem having.

A much more likely danger (although, like I said, even that seems quite unlikely currently) is that for some reason NI stops producing LabVIEW and locks down the activation servers, etc. and no one else picks it up. So I won't have any future versions and at some point it won't run on current platforms. I'm willing to take that risk, because to me it seems irrelevant. Can it happen? Yes. Is it likely? Not currently. If it will happen, the code will have to be rewritten at some point in the future, but that applies to almost any language. Code rarely stays alive for a very long time.

Oh, and since all my LabVIEW installations are on virtual machines and are already activated and backed up, I don't need to reactivate them. So there, solved that theoretical hurdle as well. Man, it's alarming how far these anonymous anti-LabVIEW boys would go to find excuses to diss it.

boog · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Anon:
Yair:
Anon:
Except I can open my .cs files in Notepad. Try that with your .vi documents. Even if Microsoft exploded tomorrow and every copy of Visual Studio disappeared from the face of the earth...
...Even if NI exploded tomorrow and all backup copies of the LabVIEW source code were stolen and eaten by alien zombies and whoever holds the LabVIEW source code in escrow would turn out to be a Bond villain... I'm basically prepared for that unlikely scenario.
Until your HD crashes, and you find you can't reinstall LabVIEW because it... blah blah bullshit blah... why even take the risk?

Why are you even bothering with this nonsense? There are so many reasons that plain-text source code wins over non-text; why don't you argue one of those viewpoints instead of entertaining such wacko bullshit scenarios?

boog · 2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Yair:
Because the risk is so negligent it's irrelevant and I prefer programming in LabVIEW. I like it better.

Thank you.

Finally somebody is just admitting the real reason they choose a particular language/environment, and not rambling off a bunch of arbitrary, subjectively-chosen metrics in order to "prove" that their way of doing things is the best.

It's so rare to see this kind of honesty among programmers.

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

I don't really see the problem. Visual tools can often make us realise how complex code actually is.

Granted 'Hello World' wouldn't look this complex (no matter how badly it were implemented), but we should keep in mind that 'Hello World' doesn't actually do anything....

This apparently comes from a test suite (or rather test equipment) and given some of the labels that include words like Yaw, Mach, Pitch I'm guessing it's something that could be related to aircraft (or maybe a wind tunnel). Perhaps I'm weird, but it doesn't surprise me that something like that might appear very complex. Assuming the WTF here is the complexity (which I assume from 'Spaghetti' being in the title), I really don't see why complexity is a WTF.

Granted, 'Labview' may claim to simplify things (as do many systems that use pictures instead of words), but the reality is that pictures don't simplify everything for everyone, they merely provide an alternate representation for different minds. I'm guessing engineers (other than Software Engineers) and the like are more comfortable using pictures and diagrams because they use such things all the time. Software Engineers and Computer Scientists, on the other hand, are often comfortable looking at the pretty patterns that well-formatted code makes. Presumably this software does actually manage to automate the testing (as it claims), and although it may be tedious, automation often is....

Summary: I'm no expert (in Labview, or anything else significant, for that matter) Apparent Complexity != WTF. Could someone please be explaining to me?

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Asiago Chow:
I'm not sure if this is why you should, or shouldn't, teach would-be software people some basic electrical engineering.
On the one hand, if whoever wrote that interface hadn't been an EE, they wouldn't have used the schematic metaphor and the screenshot never would've bubbled up here.

On the other...if the person freaked out by that image had learned to deal with schematics for even mildly complicated circuit boards, they would shrug off that image as nothing special and it never would've bubbled up here.

Not judging the quality of the software depicted...I don't know what problems they were trying to solve and I've never used labview.

"Alex" was the author...

I'm just sayin'....

2011-05-16 Reply Admin

Zylon:
Mike Caron:
What does it do? Without context, it may be justifiable.
(That said, +1 for literal spaghetti code)
And a -1 to you for misusing the word "literally".

I say, English, I'm no great scholar of the language, but I really don't understand how he's misused the word literally. Perhaps you could explain, old chap?

dictionary.com:
it·er·al /ˈlɪtərəl/ Show Spelled[lit-er-uhl] Show IPA –adjective 1. in accordance with, involving, or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words; not figurative or metaphorical: the literal meaning of a word. 2. following the words of the original very closely and exactly: a literal translation of Goethe. 3. true to fact; not exaggerated; actual or factual: a literal description of conditions.

Labview Spaghetti

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