People usually say their first language is English or Malay or Mandarin or Tamil in Malaysia. But, I like you to know my first language is LabVIEW. Like every language, it has to be taught. I can’t be ever more grateful to 2 people that have taught me how to speak LabVIEW. Yew Loon, my manager and Oliver, my senior when I was a software engineer. If both of you are seeing this. I really like to thank you personally, I know I may not have done so until now and that’s why I like to dedicate a post for you both.
LabVIEW is a graphical programming language. When I speak about it to other people, 99% of the people go like “What the hell is this?”. People’s faces showed that they were like, “It’s probably some kiddie programming language, programming with your mouse but not your keyboard? Only real men uses VIM/Visual Studio Code…”, “Only your grandmother would use graphical interface to program, are you kidding me?”.
SMH. Going full-stack on LabVIEW is natural. You have a front panel where your front-end components sit and a code panel where you program logic with function blocks and lines. Intuitively, you get well-written documentation, strongly-typed programming, good developer experience right out of the box. This is because it is a closed source language. This gave me a very good foundation as the first framework I had to pick up was the Actor framework. It has Queue Message Handling, Centralised Error Handling, VI cloning (async calls), a huge main loop where I can call all the child actors from a main actor. Kudos to my manager in building the foundations for this framework used for the machines we built.
As I program with LabVIEW, it made me a disciplined engineer. Everything in LabVIEW is typed, and it throws compile errors if you don’t connect your wires and lines correctly before your first run. Debugging was also just so seamless, I just had to tap on wires to understand what data is flowing through your program. It really felt like magic when I tried other text-based languages, even till today, I don’t know how to debug efficiently with text-based languages haha.
Anyways, this is my first language and always be my mother tongue for programming. Really hope I could find a place where I can speak LabVIEW language again and just fall in love with it all over again. But, for now, I will never forget you. Thank you for your guidance, teachings, and wonderful memories at Penang.
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