Sales pitch

Today was pretty exciting at work. Well, as I'll explain in a minute, the morning wasn't, but the afternoon was pretty cool. Without going in to much detail, but the device that I've been employed to work on at the university showed its first signs of working today. I recorded lots of videos of the cells doing cool stuff under the influence of the device. Not bad for only two months in the new job.

Why was the morning not exciting? Well, I had to go to a course about a piece of software called LabView. Anyone who has worked closely with me over the last, oh, I don't know, perhaps 8 years now will know that when I want a computer to do something, LabView is second from the bottom (only to a fucking hammer and nails) in my choice to achieve my goal.

For those who haven't had to experience Labview in all it's glory, it's a graphical programming language. You create programs, namely scientific data capture and analysis programs by dragging and dropping Virtual Instruments from a tool box on to your canvas so as to build up a picture of your house with your pet cat outside that you can show to your supervisor so they can see what a clever five year old you really are.

The people who were hosting the class were very much sales persons, with the main 'tutor' getting right on my nerves for a couple of reason. Reason number one, he introduced himself as an engineer who had never really been a fan of computer programming and so Labview was perfect for him since he had no experience of using "C-basic or whatever". Direct Quote. Heya, I've only ever drank coca-cola so I'm going to tell you exactly why it's the best drink out there.

The second reason he irritated me was that he continuously made reference to the fact that in "C-basic" if you were to miss out a semi-colon, you would have to spend hours looking through your code to find the error. Where as with Labview, this doesn't happen since Labview shows you exactly where your mistakes are. Erm, sorry, but anyone who's using a programming language as part of their job would more than likely be using an editor with syntax highlighting, that after compilation would, going by the compiler errors, highlight the offending line of code. Perhaps even give a line number.

Labview on the other hand doesn't even have a zoom out feature so that when your pretty picture, I mean code, gets so large you can't trace what the hell it's actually doing. I asked the presenter why the new version still doesn't have a zoom out feature, to which the answer was "we usually just recommend people buy a bigger monitor".

I could go on all night about this, but I won't. I haven't even mentioned the boasting of "multithreading", which was just a rebranding of the "multi-tasking" introduced in every operating system with the POSIX standard. You did not invent it, you merely made use of the fork functions available on your target platform. I could do that in C, and the program wouldn't need to be restarted every time I want to open a word processor on the same fucking computer.

Thank you, and good night.