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Comment by spartango | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a LabView fan for various reasons, but something neat they've added as of V8.0 (I think) is an auto-format tool which will take a mess of wires and organize it. Vastly improves readability, and works really well.

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You're right, the auto-wire-organizer tool is fantastic. Every time I use it I wonder what algorithm LabVIEW is using to rearrange things - not an easy problem computationally I'm sure. I use it for small sub-VIs but I find that if I use it on a large project I can't find anything after using it - I was relying on spatial layout of the VI which was lost after auto-formatting.

I guess this is analogous to algorithmically reformatting code in a normal text-based programming language...

Hmm, we were still running 6.1 in 2008 which probably explains a lot. (No upgrade path allowed at that time)

Wow 6.1 is ancient... :-) LabVIEW 8.6 is a huge leap forward in usability, stability, and performance. If you can upgrade to 2011 that's even better.

-National Instruments employee

6.1 was running on an even more ancient PC from 2001. This was at a former employer so I have no influence over this system any more. The funny thing was that we had ample budget for this project, I think we spent about $10k on a very nice rack-mount SCXI DAQ and about $60k on other equipment but upgrading the computer system driving the whole thing was out of the question due to color-of-money issues and dysfunctional inter-departmental politics.

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