Indeed, I guess. But really, that's the fault of the editors, not the concept. Xilinx graphical editor downright crashed frequently. The professional developers used vhdl or verilog instead, obviously (and even that would have been subpar because of a half assed linux port, I bet).

What I mean is, if the devs had to dogfood their own product, if labview was self hosting, it could become a lot better. But in the background it's all just lowered to an intermediate programming language, the front-end is just grafted on.

It's a marketing tool, just look at the camel case name. I hate it with a passion every time it comes up.

Edit: I said "just" a lot, although, apparently it's quite good for it's intended purposes so take that with a spoon of salt.

Edit: This thread repeatedly features screenshots of visual demo tools, for scenegraph and asset creation, e.g. werkkzeug 3: http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=8787&page=127

I had never thought about the importance of being self-hosting like that.

I missed the point about the camel case name. In any case, it's marketed as LabVIEW (VIEW standing for Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench), not LabView.

Probably it's not intended as a full development environment, more like a scripting language.

The name just strikes me as unprofessional, or at least not very serious, just like the programming environment that it is, and I guess that's not even a bad thing if that's intended, considering the target group (of technically inclined but uninitiated or at least slow with a key board kind of lab rats).