If you’re wondering what the title of the post means, you’re mostly not alone - it’s not something you’d come across unless you really have something to do with it. But what is it?

LabVIEW, a shortened version of Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench, is a programming language (not technically, but colloquially of sorts) that is used mainly in test and automation applications. More accurately speaking, it is a platform/environment for a language they call “G” (it probably stands for graphical, but I’m not sure). It is one of those rare programming languages that involve “drawing” your program, so to speak, instead of typing it out.

It may seem daunting at first to actually understand what goes on in a LabVIEW program, especially since there’s no obvious “direction” of flow (LabVIEW follows the dataflow programming paradigm) and the same program may yield different results based on when its components run. It is most certainly a very interesting thing to see but only after spending a bit of time understanding how exactly programs run. Otherwise it’ll just appear to be one gigantic piece of ugly digital art.

Why am I writing this? Because I’ve been associated with LabVIEW for the beforeseeable past (push I wonder if there is a legit phrase for the opposite of foreseeable future pop) - in my undergrad I had to use it for some projects, I did an internship at the company that created LabVIEW, and then even worked there for a couple years…and now, my Master’s thesis involves an implementation on these things - and what do I use to program? You guessed it!

So thus, there had to be something I had to write about this language somewhere.