thanks for the comments, ryan. It's always nice to hear from the people who develop the software.
1) It seems to me that allowing people to pass pointers to complex data structures would allow for more efficient memory management. I know about refnums, but Shane and others seem to imply that refnums/property nodes come with unnecessary GUI overhead. I hate pointers as much as anyone else, but being able to pass by reference without overhead would be HUGE. Is there a way to do this? 2) The "avoid local variables when possible" bit is news to me. But I get the point ;) 3) as far as I know, the GOOP projects use refnums, which are subject to the same overhead constraints as mentioned in (1). 4) I think the problem with college courses is that most professors who design course curricula know about LabView, but they don't use it themselves -- their graduate students do. I've seen certain TA's make LabView instruction a pet project, but the novelty of G means that most students are happy to get to the point where they don't have broken wires everywhere (believe me, there's lots of swearing on LabView lab days). And most students are more worried about running their experiments than programming.
