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Here's an "oldie but goodie" that made a lasting impression on me and I thought others would enjoy it. I still find the writing style to be humorous and engaging. "The Code of Abibarshim" -- which appears at the end of the linked page -- makes excellent recommendations, but I cannot say I entirely agree with all of them. Take the first one, for starters. I sense it is not so much that the name changed but that old names were allowed to persist, unchanged. As long as all instances of the old name are found and updated, I sense there is very little cause for concern. But I've already said too much. Do read the whole article! Why not take a few minutes and enjoy from some light-hearted reading? What did you like? What, if anything, would you recommend changing in his 10 conclusions?
Credit: As best I have been able to verify, this was originally credited to Paul Pendragon and published in "Production Engineering", July, 1981.
Beware the Wrath of Abibarshim!
I, Abibarshim, Great King, King of Kings, Ruler of Kish, Babil, Agade and Sankhar, and of the regions across the Hilla, conqueror of Ninevah, destroyer of Sepharia, having striven mightily and met with grief, lay down this Code that ye may not also strive mightily and meet with grief, nor fall flat on thy ass.
For I, Abibarshim, King of Kings, and all that, did buy many Aethyopeans and hire many artisans and scribes and masons and Makers of Engines and Designers of Buildings. And great was their craft and great their number, which was one hundred and forty four thousand, give or take a few job-shoppers. Yea, they did strive mightily, too, for they knew what would happen if they strove not mightily. And the name of my capital improvement project was the Tower of Babil.
Yea, great was their craft and wonderful to behold what the Designers of Buildings wrought on the papyrus. All who looked thereon did marvel at their genius. I, Abibarshim, did also look thereon and did declare their designs to have much nift.
But many days did pass, and many times did the moon wax and wane, and the tower was not yet builded.
So I, Abibarshim, King of Kings, did hie me to the palace by the Arakhtu where dwelt the Designers of Buildings and Makers of Engines. And there I found not Designers of Buildings and Makers of Engines, but Drinkers of Coffee and Tellers of Tales (whom men call hurlers of bull dung). So I vented my royal spleen, which did perturb them mightily.
"Look here, O King, etc.," said the Chief of the Makers of Engines. "Some things can't be rushed. If thou wantest us to get thy bloody tower builded on time, then thou hadst better give us a little respect. For canst thou build thy tower without us?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @10:19PM
It depends upon what you want to do. LabVIEW is great if you have a modest setup like a temperature sensor or an A/D board, and you can be up and running very quickly. It is great for a high school or undergraduate science lab. But start throwing in more things, then it gets complicated very quickly. It still seems quite manageable and you can get your system working (apart from the realtime aspect), but if you have to modify or maintain the code, it is a nightmare. It is fine for one-off systems, and ok for systems that you're not going to be messing with later or if you are the only one who will ever use the code. It is a nightmare to be handed some else's project.
If you're going to do a real project with it, then use real software to run it (where "real" here is in the eye of the beholder). When it comes to dealing with hardware, you often times are faced with the choice of coding up your own RS422 comm interface, or using the vendor-supplied driver (which sometimes is LabVIEW). Then you are at that crossroads where you need to decide if you want to take the tempting "easy" crack hit, or if you want to do it the right way from the start. And like many things, sometimes schedule pushes you to the easy way and you end up paying for it in the end (how does that saying go? Why do we never have the time/budget to do it the right way at first, but we find it when we need to fix the mess later?).
Fortunately, from this standpoint at least, python is taking over the world. More and more hardware libraries can easily be called from python.