Thursday, April 17, 2008

LabVIEW and FIRST

Do you know how some people have pet peeves? Things that shouldn't really bother them, but do?

Well, one of my pet peeves is writing LabVIEW with the wrong capitalization.

The "Introduction to LabVIEW" topic in the LabVIEW Help expands the acronym: Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench. I don't understand why publications that wouldn't call NASA "Nasa" or FIRST "First" insist in calling LabVIEW "LabView."

Speaking of FIRST, did you see today's announcement? "FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a nonprofit organization inspiring young people to be science and technology leaders, has selected the National Instruments CompactRIO embedded control platform as its next-generation FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) robot controller."

Next year's FRC competition will give high school students the option to program their robots using LabVIEW!

I expect soon we'll be seeing these students joining us in our online communities. I hope you'll join me in welcoming them!

4 Comments:

Blogger Brad said...

I know what you mean since I notice details like that also. However, you do have to admit it is an oddly-cased acronym with only 2 lowercase letters in the middle of it. If a newbie doesn't make it a point to learn it up front or at least look it up when needed, they'll most likely get it wrong. And now with the bad habits of the texting generation, we'll probably see it written in all lowercase a lot more often (which is one of MY pet peeves). Seeing sentences written with no capitalization (and sometimes no punctuation!) bothers me. It makes me wonder if some kids will continue writing like that as adults.

Keep up the great posts Christina.

10:01 AM, April 18, 2008  
Blogger Christina said...

Hi Brad,

It doesn't actually bother me as much when I see individuals capitalize LabVIEW wrong, especially in informal communications. The times that really get me riled are when editors of publications insist on using "LabView." It seems to me that they should call a product whatever the company that makes the product says it's called. But, I'd rather have "LabView" in an article than no mention of LabVIEW at all!

Thanks for reading and commenting!

4:04 PM, April 18, 2008  
Blogger Brad said...

Ah yes, I agree.

8:26 PM, April 22, 2008  
Anonymous DNatt said...

Somebody in LabVIEW Marketing once told me that publications refuse to use "LabVIEW" because it could appear (to someone not familiar with the product) like they are giving the product name a peculiar emphasis. Lame reason if you ask me, but there ya go.

10:47 PM, July 11, 2008  

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