Visual Programming and LabVIEW, part 1

This is a long post, since I'm covering several different ideas I've had the last few weeks.  I'll break it up into two separate posts this weekend.
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LabVIEW 2010 is out, I've installed it, and I've played around with it for a month.  Frankly, it leaves me a little blah.  Yes, it has some speed improvements (but they improve the speed some every year) and some nifty new features (listed here) I can use.  But there is no real wow factor for me.  Maybe I'm jaded, but the last few LV releases have been solid stolid improvements on an existing edifice.  I really liked the project concept in LV8, I applauded the object oriented programming support in LV8.2, and I thought the new icon editor in LV2009 was long overdue. NI has been releasing a lot of useful, individual features each year, but there has been no overarching theme.  I'd just like to see something more from a graphical language.

I'd felt this way for the past year or so.  Then I read an article last month in Dr. Dobb's Journal about Google's App Inventor.  I followed this link to a 15 year old article about the cube language, written by a guy who now works at Microsoft.  These two items sparked some ideas.

That's enough for tonight.  Tomorrow I'll write what I think NI should do with a future version of LabVIEW.