https://software.nasa.gov/software/LAR-17491-1
had become more popular and morphed into a general-purpose CAD program....
<pre><code> LabVIEW 2020+ Windows 10+ Git And tortoise git (for its embedded diff tool) </code></pre>I'm a big fan of tortoise and mainly its revision graph. I must say their 3-way merge tool is the best free software on Windows the only competing one, but less good, is p4merge, and it's closed source.
Also Tortoise is one of the big reasons I did not switch to MacOS at work (yes, the revision graph, and no, there are no almost-as-good-or-better alternative on Linux/MacOS, but please prove me wrong) .
TIL about LabVIEW and the G programming language. Also it breaks my mental image of NASA people working on Linux or MacOS.
Edit: By the way I’m aware that there are LabVIEW specific SWEs as mentioned in the article who are able to do wizardry with it, but I wanted to highlight its usability beyond that.
I know it's a classic "don't blame your tools!" situation, but the ability for even moderately-experienced programmers to accidentally build high-incidental-complexity tooling that becomes a nightmare to re-learn once you've lost your mental model of the program is, in my experience, unique (and frightening).
I once spent weeks trying to get a LabView-based tool up and running that a senior engineer in another section had written. Sketching out the relationships between components, documenting I/O, etc. After finally giving up the ghost, I went to that engineer for help. After spending hours (like, 5-6 hours, not 1-2) sitting next to him in my lab, he said "yeah, I'm not really sure what I was doing with this...", and proceeded to need to take the entire program back to his desk for nearly a week before he could finally explain how it worked.
This situation wasn't a one-off; it's happened with nearly every non-trivial codebase that I've ever touched that used it. In my experience, LabView is really fantastic in only two situations:
a) Very simple GUI-based DAQ tools that the person who wrote the program, and them alone, will need to use
b) Complex tools that are owned by a team of engineers who have written LabView for years and will now be dedicated exclusively to those tools
Agreed, it's terrible if you have to maintain something from before, especially as over the years they get bad as one engineer after another adds or fixes one thing or another. It's terrible for that, and those codebases and tools should have been migrated to python etc. long ago.
It is great for getting a piece of hardware working and being tested today. In the next 2 hours. Sometimes you just don't have thr time or money in the budget to write custom code for everything. Sometimes you just need to make it work and move on. Labview is great for that.
A long time ago, I used Araxis Merge[1] and I can strongly recommend it[2]. It was specifically better than both tortoise git and p4merge, after having used both of those options personally.
[1] https://www.araxis.com/merge/
[2] Assuming you're stuck in a windows development environment - there might be better tools available if you're not on Windows.
Although if you maintain/contribute to an open source project they will give you a license for free.
But this is not the killer feature that will make me replace tortoise (in fact you can even configure tortoise to use an external diff tool different from theirs).
The killer feature for me is the revision graph [0], and even if tortoise is open source, I can't find something good enough on Linux/MacOS to approach the features of that said revision graph. But once again, please prove me wrong.
But thats wrong! HN users gets it all the time.
See?
First off, this was a different user. Second, they are simply saying that they didn't read the title that way either originally, not that they don't grasp what has been said since. Third, it is still a perfectly valid way to parse that sentence even using your attemped re-framing.
"Foo from HN releases X" could perfectly reasonably be parsed to mean that X is coming from HN or from Foo. I left out the word "user" because that is an element you added that is not in the original title. "Stennis" is not a mere individual user with no actual relationship to NASA. The title doesn't contain enough information to indicate if Stennis is merely the agent or venue or department through which NASA released something, or is being referred to as it's own distinct entity releasing something of it's own, where "NASA" is merely something like the country it happens to live in. All that level of detail comes from the article or from just happening to already have prior general knowledge of NASA and it's sub-organizitions.
Other interpretations require background information to rule out:
* NASA Stennis released NASA's first OSS.
* The first software released under an open source software anywhere has been released by NASA Stennis.
* NASA's Stennis facility has acquired AGI and its first act was an OSS release.
In some ways, the "correct" interpretation also has reason to rule it out: What is newsworthy about a facility business unit of NASA doing something its first time that the rest of the organization has been doing for a while?
djoldman•8mo ago
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nasa/NDAS/refs/heads/main/...
mindcrime•8mo ago
[1]: https://opensource.org/license/nasa1-3-php
sam_bristow•8mo ago
skissane•8mo ago
I know that rule has various exceptions, but I’m left wondering exactly which of those exceptions applies in this case.
d42muna•8mo ago