Part of its secret is that it fits the problem. You're standing in a lab plugging things into other things using a snarl of BNC cables. You're not trying to design the correct abstraction. You're trying to solve your problem by lashing together the tools that you already have, sometimes in a hilarious fashion. ("We're out of voltmeters, but we do have a $50k sampling oscilloscope. We can use that!") LabVIEW code often looks like spaghetti, but that's partly because its use case also looks like spaghetti.
There is more than one kind of power tool. Computer scientists like general-purpose high-level tools, for good reason. They understand that "the pen is mightier than the sword", and they spend a lot of time collecting pens. But sometimes you need to cut something in a hurry, and at those times there's really no substitute for a well-designed sword. You can use a pen to design a sword -- perhaps even a better sword -- or to convince the folks with swords to move somewhere else. But it's a long and unreliable process. And it can be immensely satisfying to just pick up a sword and stab something!