Saturday, July 19, 2008

Cleaning my mailbox - LabVIEW vs C

My various email inboxes have been filling up with things I want to keep until I've had a chance to look at them. Today (Saturday) I had time to go over a couple.

National Instruments has a semi-monthly email newsletter where they publish details about new white papers, new products, etc. Some of the time it's just marketing and not useful, sometimes it's good. The article that made me keep this latest issue was about comparing LabVIEW with C. I was particularly interested in this white paper since I had blogged about this subject a year ago.

I judged this paper on two different levels. The first level is a marketing level: it's apparent goal is to convince C programmers that LabVIEW can do about anything that C can do for test engineering. Does it convince? Ehh, maybe. It certainly goes through a list of typical things that a C person may ask about. SO on that level I would give it good marks.

The second level I considered to be more philosophical: does it address why LabVIEW would be better than C, at least for test engineering? On this level it really falls flat. After I read it I couldn't come up with any single reason it gave me for why it would be preferable. But maybe I was asking too much.

1 comment:

JAV said...

I like your synopsis of the paper, I read it Sunday at the urging of our NI Rep. He's been trying to convince me LabVIEW is better. The paper was interesting but not convincing. I had already agreed [with him] that you can do everything in LabVIEW that you can do in C (maybe not better, but you can do it)

BTW, nice blog, I just stumble on it today.