End of NXG?

I was very shocked when I heard the news at work about NI binning NXG. NXG was announced back when I worked at NI and I still remember the excitement people had for a more modern LabVIEW - that "ooh" as they demo'd the zoom, those flashy web VIs. 

It does make me wish that I'd listened a bit more at the GLA summit "LabVIEW Roadmap" talk. You see, it was on around dinner time and I was chopping onions... Multitasking isn't a thing that my brain handles well. Especially when holding a sharp knife. I might have tuned out when they mentioned NXG because I wasn't planning to start learning it for another couple of years. Though the half formed impression that I got was that NXG was very much still happening.

I'm sure the last thing anyone want to hear is another hot take on this, but it does remind me of the problems that Netscape had with their rewrite. It must have taken courage to pull the plug after investing so much time and money into it. I read something once about how it is easy to think that the code you have inherited is a steaming pile of trash, but then when you start from scratch, you realise just how many corner cases and bugs can only be identified from longterm use. Hey, it might not look pretty, but at least it works!

So, soon NI's full attention will focussed back on current gen. Cue a sigh of relief to all developers that were worried about massive migrations and unsupported code, even themselves becoming "legacy". Personally I would like to see a more stable LabVIEW. Seeing the 'LabVIEW has encountered a problem" screen once a day is a bit of a drag. Dependency management is another one of my biggest bugbears, so Project Dragon has given me a lot of hope. But more on that in another post! Full 64-bit support for all toolkits would be nice too (people get confused when they see my programs are 32-bit), and better window management solutions. Just the simple things really.