Products · Product
LabVIEW
Raised as a usability problem by 37 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 33 threads.
People raised many different problems with LabVIEW, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 43 complaints
- Dozens of windows open and compiling freezes the IDE for over an hour2025-11-04
- Cannot zoom in on diagrams; poor ergonomics overall2024-07-30
- The development environment is so poor the commenter hated using it2024-07-15
- Hard to follow control flow because no clear reading order2024-07-15
- The backplane abstraction becomes unhelpful once several things run at once2023-04-15
- Can't find the right block, like a double-to-single converter, even after searching and hunting2023-03-31
- Found LabVIEW's UI difficult to teach students with2023-03-31
- Every function requires opening two windows, the UI and the code, to understand it2022-12-22
- Dragging and dropping through menus makes every small action take too long2022-07-16
- Programming in it is very slow, hard to debug, and time consuming to refactor2021-12-30
- Code becomes incomprehensible spaghetti, and workarounds like duplicating code are needed2021-09-01
- Input via dropping and wiring causes RSI for the user2021-07-02
- Scripting system is hard to use and project provider licensing is awkward2020-05-31
- Creating new actors or messages takes many clicks across files in a slow IDE, error-prone2020-05-31
- Wires become impossible to trace and buggy to change when GUI variables are used2020-05-21
- Found the complex LabVIEW experiment control system so frustrating to work with that they rewrote it2020-05-21
- Large LabVIEW programs become tangled spaghetti of wires that are hard to maintain2020-05-21
- Can't Ctrl-F for control-flow structures, so users must mouse around for everything2020-05-21
- Debugging deep sub-VI hierarchies is slow, requires constant window switching, and can't print values2020-05-21
- Writing complex logic visually is horrible; order of operations is hard to get right2020-05-21
- Examples are hidden in a separate program with a poor search function2019-08-07
- Finding the function you want requires navigating several submenus2018-11-20
- Large programs become cumbersome to navigate across many windows and viewing modes2018-04-23
- Dragging blocks around with the mouse is a pain compared to keyboard use2017-09-02
- Complex programs become slow and impossible to refactor or maintain2017-07-14
- Makes it nearly impossible to build usable interfaces2017-06-08
- Fine mouse manipulation on the screen causes eyestrain, neck and wrist fatigue2017-06-05
- Visual dataflow code becomes tangled spaghetti and painful for beginners to learn2017-05-01
- Spatial wiring of variables and logic is a pain to use; forced to manage impure workarounds that clutter programs2017-02-12
- Simple tasks like hello world take many tedious steps of placing and wiring graphical blocks2014-10-07
- Large graphical programs require lots of scrolling and page switching, hard to navigate and comprehend2013-10-15
- Wires running everywhere and ambiguous function blocks make code hard to read2013-08-23
- Simple tasks like formatting a string are difficult; complex block diagrams become unreadable2013-07-27
- Following wires and variables across a diagram makes code hard to read and understand2012-09-09
- Wires and blocks get hidden by mistake, and extracting subVIs means manually rewiring everything2012-09-09
- Hard to maintain and debug beyond trivial applications unless carefully built2012-04-14
- Connecting and managing wires is a pain; data type shown only by thin border2012-04-14
- Each subroutine opens separate windows, causing clutter and making large programs hard to debug2011-04-26
- Building a program takes hundreds of clicks for a few function calls2010-10-30
- Defining subroutines via icons and panes is slow and painful2010-07-08
- Visual programs are very difficult to debug when they don't work2010-01-22
- Setup takes an hour and errors are impossible to troubleshoot; also slow2009-10-10
- Simple conditional takes about 100 clicks to build2009-10-09