I am learning to use LabVIEW as part of my honours project, and was wondering what benefits the graphical programming language has over a textual one?
Its all about the equipment drivers and user capabilities. NI (Labview) has a well supported set of lab equipment drivers that are easily interfaced. A test operator (not a developer) needs a gui with a big green/red pass/fail button. I've implemented complicated automation via python in cygwin. A Labview developer was able to invoke the cygwin/python system and data mine the log files. So you can do both. The python system is portable, maintainable, extensible, usable and best of all, free.