The applicability of the visual programming language LabVIEW to large real-world applications

Graphical programming languages allow a natural, intuitive man-machine interaction. As a result, graphical programming has gained much popularity over the past several years, primarily because many scientists and engineers have experienced improvements in programming efficiency due to the natural understandability of graphical programming tools. In general, however, there is a perception that the graphical paradigm does not lend itself well to large-scale applications. The paper examines the suitability of graphical programming languages to real-world applications. The specific graphical programming language evaluated in this paper is LabVIEW, though some of the concepts discussed apply to other visual programming languages as well. A relatively large case study involving simulation as well as real-time acquisition programmed in LabVIEW is investigated. Advantages and limitations of LabVIEW for such applications are discussed.