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And Simulink. I lost years in grad school to Simulink, but it is very nice for complex state machine programming. It’s self documenting in that way. Just hope you don’t have to debug it because that’s a special hell.


I quite like Simulink because it's designed for simulating physical systems which are naturally quite visual and bidirectional. Like circuit diagrams, pneumatics, engines, etc. You aren't writing for loops.

Also it is actually visually decent unlike LabVIEW which looks like it was drawn by someone who discovered MS Paint EGA edition.


Simulink is based on the block diagram notation used in control theory for decades earlier - before personal computers and workstations. The notation is rigorous enough you can pretty much pick up a book like the old Electro-Craft motor handbook (DC Motors Speed Controls Servo Systems), enter the diagrams into Simulink, and run them. With analogous allowances to how you would enter an old schematic into a SPICE simulator.

LabView was significantly more sui generis and originated on Macintosh about a decade earlier. I don't hate it but it really predates a lot of more recent user experience conventions.




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