I have written a bunch of programs for interfacing with instruments and when I started doing that I was using labview but it was such a pain. It was liberating when I found that VISA has python bindings. I now do all the instrument-interfacing code in Python+Qt. It is so much more productive that it makes me wonder why do people still want to use labview for this kind of job. I mean its visual language is complicated that it makes even the simplest things (like formatting a string) difficult. And on the top of that if you try to make something more complex the block diagram is completely unreadable. Madness.