Could you describe this in more detail? I think it would be interesting. How does LabVIEW do those things and why did you find it elegant?
My experience was very different from yours. I couldn't believe how simple it was to add an additional test in parallel. It was just a copy/paste, update the functions, test parameters, and I/O. If only writing multithreaded code in C++ or Java was that simple. After my experience, I could see how LV could be a good fit for computer vision apps running on highly parallel architectures.
It's too bad there not more modern, open dataflow languages out there. Massively complex modern CPUs wouldn't exist with tools like Verilog. As software grows in complexity, these tools may also offer some solutions on the software side.
Currently other solutions are either Matlab (which sounds soul-destroying) or Python (which is still nontrivial).