I have written a bunch of programs for interfacing with instruments and when I started doing that I was using labview but it was such a pain. It was liberating when I found that VISA has python bindings. I now do all the instrument-interfacing code in Python+Qt. It is so much more productive that it makes me wonder why do people still want to use labview for this kind of job. I mean its visual language is complicated that it makes even the simplest things (like formatting a string) difficult. And on the top of that if you try to make something more complex the block diagram is completely unreadable. Madness.
It all boils down to using the right tool for the job. If you need performance, C will blow python out of the water. If you need a quick solution that’s light on data acquisition and heavy on algorithms, python will probably be a better choice. I’ve run into a highly concurrent, signal processing tasks handled beautifully with LabVIEW and its built in SP modules. Python would have been a terrible choice for that application.
