The next chapter for Labview

For the last three decades, Labview has been the programming core of the National Instruments ecosystem: a programming environment with the design philosophy that it’s there to serve non-programmers, or rather, engineers who have better things to do than to hone their programming skills. Labview programs are graphically created as flowcharts that respond to data coming in, usually from a range of instruments that NI offers. This allows engineers to concentrate on the problem at hand, rather than on arcane implementation details.

Over those thirty-plus years, the tool has undergone heavy development to adapt to the current needs of the engineering community. For the past decade NI has released a new major version on a yearly basis. This year, however, the company from Austin bucked the trend by releasing not one but two versions at the same time: in addition to Labview 2017, there’s the 1.0 release of the brand-new Labview NXG. NXG is described as a tool that requires even less programming, using software guides to let engineers create relatively simple data acquisition applications with just a few mouse clicks.