Alan,From a Reuters news story dated March 29, 2004
Gates also said advances in programming will allow software developers to create applications in less time by using visual representations of the inner workings of software rather than writing lines of programming code.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040329/tc_nm/tech_microsoft_gates_dc
Alan Gleichman Hella Electronics Corp. Plymouth, Michigan
My bet is that Gates is referring to Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools that generate and maintain code automatically from Universal Modeling Language (UML), or similar graphical modeling languages. LabVIEW/G isn't a system modeling language, it is an implementation language. The new LabVIEW State Diagram Editor is a step towards the LabVIEW *IDE* being capable of modeling -- you can view (and edit) your state machines from the perspective of a state transition diagram. As far as implementation languages go, G is one of the best. It is a revolutionary step up from typing lines of code. However, when we look at the big picture we still have a long way to go and, unfortunately, until we can programmatically generate, inspect, and maintain LabVIEW code we can't start tackling the problem of connecting modeling tools to G. But, with the recent discovery of undocumented scripting features in LabVIEW 7.0 (see link below), this may not be that far off... and Gates might not have anything to do with it ;-)
LabVIEW Scripting Forum @ LAVA: http://forums.lavausergroup.org/index.php?showforum=29
-Jim
