Many scientists and engineers do software programming as a (significant) part of their daily job. Either setting up experiments, taking measurements, developing prototypes, testing their designs, embedding software as part of larger systems, or modeling and analyzing the world around them. In this paper, the authors present a graphical programming framework, LabVIEW, and associated language and libraries, as well as programming techniques and patterns that they have found useful in making FPGAs accessible to scientists and engineers as domain expert software programmers.