The size of the wiring diagram can be intimidating for some folks, but a patient editor of someone else's program should have no problem finding where to edit.

The friendly GUI of LabView gives me the illusion that I ought to be able to jump in and make changes with no training or reading references. I have always found it harder, though, that other languages. That may not be true for someone experienced in LabView.

Teaching computer programming is so much easier with LabView because most people I teach are familiar with either process flow diagrams or wiring diagrams.

Clever, but no.

I used to buy the old Tektronix wax printers. They were great for their time.

My perception of the programming effort was pretty similar to yours, db.

I sold Tektronix test equipment and went to a number of seminars by National Instruments on LabView. Like all higher order languages, I thought it was amazing what you could do and how quickly, however it was often frustrating what you could not do.

I also learned mainly Fortran. I was excited about programming until I did an internship and found out at the time that the kernel I liked about programming, which was solving an engineering problem took up maybe 5% of the effort. Another 45% of the effort was devoted to making pretty, user friendly I/O and the other 50% was testing and documentation.

I coded in traditional languages (mostly Fortran) until National Instruments LabView's object-oriented language came out. LabView is simple to use, yet powerful, and benefits from a large user base.

This is interesting.
Having worked in IT for over 25 years, I came in right as OOP was going mainstream.

I have always looked at OOP as being related to Plato's Metaphysics: (there is a universe of perfect forms from everything in our universe renders).

I will put this on the "stack of stuff to get to", but definitely high up in the stack.

Thanks for posting this.

OOP was created so that cheap programmers from the 3rd world could be hired instead of brilliant creative coders/designers with western English as a first language. (Admittedly there was a limited supply of those brilliant coders/designers.) No creative tricks for higher performance (apparently unneccessary with cheap hardware) and lower maintenance cost of cents per hour drone programmers. Similar to allowing unfettered illegal immigration from dictatorships with no history of individual liberty to eliminate a majority of people who demand liberty and justice from a looter dominated government. ;^)