How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

So how did you learn? Especially to you LabView people, how did you learn? :rolleyes: Honestly looking at it, I can't figure it out... I learned C++ from books I picked up from the library and it just stuck on to me, and Java came easily, I am in the AP Computer Science class at my school... But how did you learn LabView? I cant figure it out, seriously, C++ looks easier than lab view...

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I stared by taking a Visual Basic Class at my school. Our robotics team needed more programers so I just played around with it for a little while (3 hours) and I had a tank drive and shooter programed last year. I thought it was easy. There were so many examples that I looked at. Have you gone through any of them?

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Me, well I was given a crash course on Lab view, then had a copy of the FRC edition thrusted into my hands, was told to install it on my laptop, and repeat what I learned (this is all thanks to Todd).

From there I just started to play with it in my free time. Whenever I got really stuck (the Help File and Online Recourses wouldn't work) I would go to my College Mentor and asked him. The only reason I did this is I sorta had to learn on the Job. We had one other programmer, and he had a stressful season as it was having to do everything but Autonomous.

Edit: While this is how I mostly learned, it was more or less the need to have to learn on the Job. If anyone happens to know of some great classes to learn more LabView (as well as C++ and Java) I would appreciate it if you posted them here.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I personally took an open university course in OOP and Java. However it got really rusty until I started taking CS in my school which gave me a lot of practical experience. I got some C++ experience from talking to our more senior members of the programming team.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Yea it was a breeze to program in Java the hard part was trying to debug it, because it might not even be your code at all, but electrical, so it took a simple problem like an hour to fix... I was trying to fix whats not broken and just messes everything up... Other than that, it was really easy, I just cant understand how people can use LabView...

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Before Last Year, i have never programmed any language in my life (except for HTML in 5th grade). There was a kid starting a robotics team at my school, and i thought it would be cool to sign up and build some robots. I signed up and there was no one to program the robot. I played around with LV a little bit, and a little bit more, until i logged about 100 hours of LV. After that, i learned C++, VB and Java. But as i have learned, you are NEVER done learning how to program, every time you drag that box, or write that next line of code, there is always much much more to learn, or at least, a different way to code what you just coded.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Debugging can be difficult but my dad, one of the programing mentors, is an electrical, mechanical, and software engineer. He has experience and normally knows were to look. I learned LabView simply by being able to play with it. I didn't find it hard to understand. I have no experience with Java, so I don't know how hard Java is. If you just play around with it, maybe you can learn to understand it.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

The last part is true, technology is evolving every day, you can even say programming is an art

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Me and my dad have competitions to see who can write the best code :cool: It's amazing to see how many different ways to code something.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

No I was saying that the problem was electrical all along and I change my code (which is correct) but it becomes wrong and too much headaches... Yea I agree, programming is mostly from experience... Big companies rather have the person with 4 year experience in programming than a kid with 4 years of education but 0 years on real programming experience...

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I learned how to program by emulating examples. I got good at programming by writing programs. I got very good at programming by writing programs in collaboration with other programmers, where each piece of software was treated as a contract to perform a specific task given certain conditions.

I learned LabVIEW by reading the documentation, following the examples, and going through the provided tutorials. I know a lot about how it works, I can usually make it do what I want, and I can often do a good job of explaining to others how to make it do what they want. I'm not at the level of proficiency where I can just wire things up without first doing some analysis and planning.

David, I believe you will always have trouble with LabVIEW until you set aside what you already "know" about programming. You can't understand a dataflow language well by attempting to apply concepts from procedural programming languages; you'll likely get stuck on the superficial similarities and fail to grok the true nature of things. Go through the online videos with an open mind and as little preconception as you can.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I found that FRC Mastery helps greatly.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I learned JAVA (my first programming language) 3 or 4 years ago alone, because my programming class was way too slow.
After two years programming in java we started our FRC team and as a very small team i was the only one on the electronics and programming.
Because we started our team two weeks after the kickoff, i didnt have the time to go to a LabView course or something like that.
I watched a "how to make a simple motor vi with joystick" video in NI's website and understood the basic code, and then - everything is the same in LabView.
I made myself a testing enviroment - took all the electronics and connected them and tried different codes. After two weeks of this i could program the 2009's robot.
Good luck :)

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

My experience is pretty similar to Alan's. I learned all of the text based languages from books and a lot of trial programming.

As for LabVIEW, I learned it from the LVmastery tutorial videos. Those are great. Other than those videos, it's been looking at examples and some good old-fashioned trial and error. I'm waaaaaaaaaay far from a LabVIEW expert, but I've been able to make it do what I want with relatively little effort. I think I spent a total of 3 hours watching the videos and that is all it took to start doing some cool stuff. That is what makes the dataflow languages pretty nice - you don't need big books and days of learning. They are made to be very intuitive from the start and the need to memorize the details of the syntax is mostly eliminated.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I learned C++ by looking through tutorials and Java in a class, but like most others here, I just looked through the Labview examples to learn Labview. I can program in Labivew now, but I'm not used to its format and always get confused by the mess of wires I create.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

My avatar is a Commodore PET 4032. 40 character wide screen... 32 kB of RAM. Made in Canada! You could get a floppy drive for them... but they cost a fortune. Mostly our programs were saved and loaded from audio cassette tapes. Type in "load", press "play" and wait five or ten minutes.

They cost a fair bit back in the '70's but our local high school had one and my Dad, a teacher there, could take turns taking it home on the weekend to learn how to use it. I'm not sure how many hours I spent down in the basement with a manual and computer magazines figuring out how to write code in BASIC.

There weren't many people around to teach programming, at least in northern BC, in those days, and there certainly was no internet to go to for advice.

But it was a fabulous time to learn programming because the expectations were so low. If you could make a COMPUTER do SOMETHING... ANYTHING... it was considered pretty impressive. If you could make it do what you wanted it to do, well... that was even better.

When Zork and Space Invaders were high tech, it wasn't too hard for one person, working alone in their basement, to come up with an impressive game or application.

That's why I like teaching programming using robots and microcontrollers. Most people have no preconceptions of what a robot or microcontroller should be able to do... so programming a $2.00 PIC to receive an IR remote control signal and drive a mini sumo robot is seen as "impressive", even though it is a reasonably simple task.

But regardless of the platform or language, there is no substitute for hours upon hours of creating, troubleshooting, modifying and debugging your own code.

Jason

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

http://www.learncpp.com/
and constantly looking up documentation. My favorite learning technique is kind of... brute force, I set out to do something I don't know and then consult the documentation for how to do it. Even my very first "programming" language, TI-84 BASIC, I learned from the calculator documentation and some practice. Of course you also need a certain degree of patience to do this.

I had a partner last year, both of us knew no LabVIEW and had no one to teach us, and we had to set out to program a bot using it. The other guy decided that since we didn't know anything, we couldn't hope to do anything. What did I do? Go straight into the VI and try to figure out what everything does, referring to documentation along the way. I learned a lot this way and we had a robot working by ship date (nothing fancy, just basic teleop and straight line autonomous - but better than nothing). The other guy gave up, mostly sat there and watched, and quit the team afterward.

(Despiteless I was still much more confortable with C++ so I had us switch this year.)

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

My first year with 339, I went into build season with virtually no programming experience - just a tiny bit of experimentation with VB. The first time I walked into a meeting, the programming mentor intercepted me and asked, "programming and electronics?" I said yeah, that sounds interesting, and ended up on the programming team. That season, I didn't do much coding at all. In fact, I didn't write anything myself; just added debug statements and changed constants in others' code. I recommended a few algorithms for autonomous, but other members and mentors took care of the actual implementation because I didn't have the knowledge to do it myself. That year, I picked up some of the general concepts of programming but didn't fully understand everything I was doing; this lead to, for example, me being confused about the difference between preprocessor macros and global variables.

The next year, my second in FIRST, I was more capable. Halfway through that build season, I wrote my first complete function - in Notepad, no less - an algorithm that used a gyro sensor to keep the robot moving forward along a straight path. It didn't work at all initially, but I kept tweaking it and working on it (without mentor assistance), and eventually made it work so well, we failed to notice when one of our CIMs burnt out because the software corrected for it perfectly.

That Summer was the last one before we switched to the new control system, and my mentor wanted us to prepare for the change, so I learned C++ and we discussed how we would design the program once the new control system became available. This is where I really made the jump to a self-teaching programmer. I loved the concept of object-oriented programming and became an expert in C++, to the point that my mentor wanted me to "dumb down" my code so that new students could better understand it. I was using templates, multiple inheritance, functors, and who knows what else. He also explained to me how compilers and programming in general work, so I began to understand the purpose of the constructs I was dealing with. We even went into optimization for a bit.

In 2009, my senior year with 339, I wrote the majority of the robot code from scratch. Looking back, it's amazing how quickly I jumped from not knowing anything about programming to being a self-motivated expert in the subject.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

about 4 hours of looking at different vis in labview. majorly tired after that.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Quite honestly, i learned coding through studying open source programs and reading half of a c manual

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Good question, i took a basic CS class in our school, however, i mainly taught robotics stuff myself. I was pretty successful, until I deployed my first code, then i realized that it is a lot harder then i expected. If i ever had any q's, i went to this forum for help... so yeah, that is how i learned.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

TI-83+

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I'm pretty much a self-taught programmer. My main experiments with C were from the RCX and NXT lego bricks, through NQC and NXC. I learned most of the basic concepts from dissecting the source code of programs, and once I got around to reading programming books I didn't learn much other than a few C++ concepts (try blocks mainly). After I learned C++ most other languages came naturally to me, the only thing that confused me with other languages were the APIs (and that stupid foreach statement in PHP). I picked up LabVIEW a bit for writing our dashboard, and found it fairly easy to understand, but all of the mysterious symbols for the basic functions drove me away from it a bit.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I first learned to program from BASIC. I was bored with it in about an hour. Then I learned about Microsoft VisualBasic. I lucked out since Microsoft just recently (then) invested quite a bit of money to commission a 12-video series to kick start people to learn VisualBasic from scratch (learning about concepts like variables or GUI) to building your own RSS Feed Reader. I followed that night and day intensely for a while. Then I got the hang of it. Got good enough to build a VisualBasic program to display all the running processes in a list and interact with a local database.

Then I "picked up" (or honestly, pirate) FlashMX, then I witnessed the Macromedia to Adobe transition. I was pretty big in flash community forum started by an Adobe employee (community evangelist). But those days are over. I don't pirate Flash (just making sure) nor do I work with Flash, but now that there are open source alternatives, I might toy around with that (more compiler-like than an IDE).

After that, I was basically on my own. Once I knew "how things worked" in a simple scale, I was able to bridge that in to more deeper and advanced concepts and knowledge.

Now what I like doing is developing Mac & iPhone apps. I intern every summer for an iPhone app consultancy.

I must say I was pretty lucky that I had a pretty powerful computer at the time, a lot of free time on my hands (5th~6th grade), and that video series that Microsoft had given for free. Now it's hard to find that video series, but I think it's great.

Keehun
Team 2502

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I had a Visual Basic Class in high school and played around with my graphing calculator a bit. The math teacher was amazed when I wrote a quadratic formula solver :p He was a cool one that realized I wasn't cheating.

I picked up how to program pretty easily, and when I started college I had classes that taught me about object-oriented programming. Last year I had a class on design patterns and it was probably my favorite class yet.

I learned all my FRC stuff from other mentors on the team (We used C, now C++). How to program for embedded, etc. I actually found it more interesting to work under the constraints of the old IFI control system.

I love programming because I am super lazy when it comes to tedious tasks (like repeatedly solving the quadratic formula). If it's something a computer can do.... why not?

(I'm in school for Software Engineering)

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I started in 7th grade when we learned how to program a CNC machine.
I was interested in Game Programming, so I got a few books on that (Big Mistake, the book was on a form of basic - should have tried learning a more standard language first.)

Fast forward to High School - one of the mentors took me through C programming with the edu robot (earliest form of VEX, I believe teams were given kits of these when they switched over).

Also, 3 years of Java in high school, a semester of C and Matlab in college.



I haven't "mastered" labview yet, however I'm pretty confident if I needed to get something done in it I could hack my way through (I've been given tutorials from another mentor on our team). I'd much rather give the problems than do them :P

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

My parents got a computer when I was 8. My dad had a rule that I could only use the computer for an hour a day, unless I was programming. Because of that, I got a lot of books from the library and played with BASIC and Pascal. I tried to learn C at that point also, but it was too complicated for me.

As for LabVIEW, I started with the Learn LabVIEW in 6 hours online course. From there I started doing Project Euler problems using LabVIEW. Since then, everything I've done is FIRST related, first implementing our 2008 code on the cRIO with LabVIEW, and now the 2009 and 2010 robots. Helping teams at regionals is a great way to get exposed to a lot more stuff.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I got interested in programming in about 6th grade. I became fairly knowledgeable of C-like languages.

Dowload a Free OS, and just start tinkering. If you don't destabilize your system a few times while starting out, you aren't tinkering enough. For this reason, I feel very strongly that anyone interested in computers should get their own computer -not a family computer- that is entirely their's, so that they break it, 1) no one will eat their head off 2) they can _learn_ while taking their time to fix it, instead of hurrying up & taking it somewhere, because others depend on it. Go into it with the mindset that you have something to contribute, find something that doesn't work how you like, and [try to] fix it. See http://catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

The summer between 8th grade and Fresman year I decided to sit down for a few days and teach properly learn C. A lot of reading the gLibC manual and cprogramming.com (although, cprogramming.com follows the track of teaching C++ first, I didn't do this, nor recommend using this. I think that it is very hard to _fully_ understand Object Oriented if you have never seen anything without it.)

Last year I learned G (LabVIEW is actually just the program for `writing' the G language) just by tinkering with it for FRC, because one of our mentors insisted we use it, and our programming team leader went with it. Bad decision. I feel that G could be a good language, but that LabVIEW is a horrible program, and that the file format used to store G could use some work. (Also, it required me to dig out the Vista license that came with my lappy to put Windows on the thing. Vista gives any other program a bad first impression)

At some point I picked up C++ to fix a segfault in an app. Several thousand lines of code, no comments; I got a decent understanding (though a lot of it was masked by Qt). I did re-factor it a bit, but the bare changes to fix the problem are disappointingly short.

Earlier this year I taught myself Java in a weekend for a coding competition. (Less impressive when you consider I already knew C, C++, PHP, and others). This came in handy when we ended up using Java this year. I teach the AP Comp Sci students on the stuff about Java, having never taken the course; self-motivation will teach you betting than any class ever will. (I'm taking the class next year, I would go ahead and take the AP test now, if it weren't so expensive)

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

My programming buddy and I attended a very basic workshop on LabVIEW for high school students held at a university. It mostly just went over generally how the program worked, what the front panel and the block diagram were. So basically, we both learned how to program with LabVIEW on our own last season, and it wasn't all that difficult. We figured out the function of each subVI thanks to the help function :rolleyes: Now we love programming in LabVIEW and will never go back to C (not that we knew that much C to start with).

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

The whole idea just interested me so one summer I went out and picked up a c++ book and taught myself. Easily one of the most useful things I've ever learned. As for LabVIEW, it was a whole lot of trial and error. At first I would make things and plug them in but as I kept using more and more I got to actually understand the language and how things work. Probably the hardest part was getting adjusted to the way it executes, coming from a background programming that executes sequentially

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

FORTRAN, on key-punch cards. Edit/run cycle: 24 hours.

We've come a long way, baby.

~

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

Java: I took AP Computer Science this year at my school. It's fairly straight-forward. And fun.

LabVIEW: "We need something that does this." "How about this?" "Nope, try this one." "Now the robot doesn't work." "Wait, the VI just doesn't do what I want it to do. I'm going to change it." *Windows dies*

I really wish I was kidding... This is pretty much what happened last year. Sure, LabVIEW's good because it has a drag-and-drop item for some things that would take 30 lines of code, but I find it easier to work in Java. I managed to use LabVIEW without a complete understanding of how programming actually works, so I spent a good amount of Computer Science going "Ohhh..."

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I started tinkering with HTML and the like in about 4th grade and went from there. By 5th grade I had started toying with PHP and by seventh I taught myself Java. I'm pretty sure I went that direction due to the lack of C/C++ books at the local bookstore :P. No complaints though, I think it's a ton easier to experiment with Java than C, especially on Windows due to the number of easily-usable tools.

Around this time I had also discovered Linux. Once you get basic system usage down its not too long before you figure out how to hack bash/perl/python/ruby/etc code if thats the route you want to go down.

This year I formally took a C class which helped a bit (my C skills were a bit rusty, and still are)- it was a ton of fun, and myself and some friends ended up spending our free time inventing new ways to deliver Rickrolls to people :P. By the end we made sure the entire class knew about them (including the teacher!)

But I think the biggest drive towards learning was books (I've managed to collect quite a few!), and most importantly, boredom. Lots and lots of it. Where else would you find time to experiment with all of this? :D

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I started learning LabVIEW almost two years ago, in the summer of 2008.
Actually, my introduction to dataflow languages was with LOGO!soft, for the Siemen's LOGO! PLC.
It was quite simple: You had inputs, outputs, and shift registers. (as well as a real-time clock) Almost everything was boolean, except for the two analog inputs. There were no loops or if statements; the code simply repeated about 100 times a second.
I happened to be using it to create a half-size driving version of an FRC robot. (I still have that robot, rebuilt and improved several times. It now has a full FRC control system on it, and we're planning on converting it to a mecanum drive.)

Anyways, going from LOGO!soft, LabVIEW was still difficult. To help learn it, the first thing I did was take my programs in LOGO!soft and convert them to LabVIEW. To do this, I also had to create some of the LOGO! functions that didn't already exist in the LabVIEW 8.5 Student edition (it came in the 2008 KOP). They were the latching relay, flip-flop, on-delay, off-delay, and rising/falling edge.
I then had to figure out what was something USEFUL that I could create with LabVIEW. I started working on a robot simulator, of sorts. Given the speeds of the left and right drivetrains (in pixels per iteration), it would map the robot's path (or rather, the path of both drivetrains) on a picture indicator.
It was pretty neat, and I spent some months working on that.
I think I also played with navigation algorithms, working directly off a map of a field. (In this case, "field" means an image with obstacles drawn on it.)

Before I started using LabVIEW, I was certainly a novice programmer, but I had been learning Java in 8th grade. (I got a bit sick of all the compiler problems I was having, though, and had primarily lost intrest.)

In December of 2008, we got the early control system shipment, and I learned the FRC Framework. I had the robot in my room for a couple of weeks, so that I could work on it throughout christmas break. (I had the control system bench tests done by the end of three days.) We were the only team at our kickoff who had a robot running with the new control system. (I was with 2557 at that time, but I've since started another team.)

By kickoff, you could say I knew LabVIEW and the control system, and I started transitioning into teaching people.

EDIT:
Once major resource that has helped me is LabVIEW for Everyone
I started learning purely from the LabVIEW help, and then used some other resources like LabVIEW for Dummies (which appears to be defunct now).
If I had known about all the resources available (say, if I had looked on NI.com), then I probably would have had an easier start.

Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?
 

I first learned 'programming' using a Texas Instruments TI-58 programmable calculator. I guess that was late 70s or early 80s.
Next step was an Atari 400 (6502 CPU, 16K RAM, membrane keyboard).
I bought the BASIC and Assembler cartridges for it as well as every manual Atari printed.
Even though Atari sold (and regrettably, I bought) a tape storage device, both these machines effectively lacked any useful storage for programs, which was frustrating.
After 2 years exploring and mastering the guts of the Atari using 6502 assembly language, I was proficient enough to land a job at Muse Software, the company that produced the original Castle Wolfenstein games on Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers.
Muse management had the foresight to predict that PCs and C programming were the future, which profoundly benefited my career.