LabVIEW

LabVIEW (which stands for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) is a graphical dataflow programming platform from National Instruments.  Most programmers don't know about LabVIEW, unless they work in an scientific or engineering environment.  LabVIEW is not marketed to the general programming population and it has a very high barrier to entry -- a license costs between $1,400 and $4000 per seat!

Let me just say that LabVIEW totally rocks!  If you're lucky enough to have a job where you can get your hands on LabVIEW, you should definitely take it for a test drive.  It will change your life.  However, if your a formally trained computer sciency type, or you've been programming the "old fashioned way" (text based languages) for a long time, you might not find it to your liking.

If you want to find other people who are programming in LabVIEW, you should check out the LAVA discussion forums.  LAVA stands for LabVIEW Advanced Virtual Architects.  LAVA is the largest independent LabVIEW discussion forum and is a thriving community of passionate LabVIEW developers.

Some LabVIEW Resources

• LabVIEW Wiki - Community maintained LabVIEW encyclopedia
• LAVA Discussion Forums - a community of advanced LabVIEW users
• OpenG.org - Free Open Source LabVIEW Tools
• Info-LabVIEW - a LabVIEW discussion mailing list
• LabVIEW FAQ - a list of frequently asked LabVIEW questions
• LabVIEW Tutorial - provided by the University of Western Australia
• National Instruments - the makers of LabVIEW

LabVIEW Blogs

• Thinking in G - Jim Kring's blog on professional software development using LabVIEW
• EXPRESSIONFLOW - A blog on LabVIEW and visual object-oriented programming by Tomi Maila
• Eyes on VIs - A perspective on VI development from a member of LabVIEW R&D.