View Single Post
  #99   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 20-01-2011, 19:42
PAR_WIG1350's Avatar
PAR_WIG1350 PAR_WIG1350 is offline
Registered User
AKA: Alan Wells
FRC #1350 (Rambots)
Team Role: Alumni
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Rookie Year: 2009
Location: Rhode Island
Posts: 1,188
PAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond reputePAR_WIG1350 has a reputation beyond repute
Re: why blame the programmers??

Quote:
Originally Posted by davidalln View Post
Your programmer made those pretty light pulsate over time during the match. Continue blaming electrical.
Unless a 555 was involved. But honestly, I find that problems are evenly distributed throughout the robot. However, Magic smoke, the smell of melting stuff, a chain that has come off its sprocket, and binding gears are really obvious. A sign error, or a missing increment/decrement operator, on the other hand, can be difficult to track down, and those are just simple, easily solved problems. more complex errors, such as accidentally causing a function to fail to execute by making the conditions it would normally execute under impossible (such as
Code:
void myfunction (void)
int main()
{
     int nvar=0;
     if nvar>1
     {  
         myfunction ();
         nvar=0;
      }
      else 
      {
      }
      //...
}
and elsewhere you had a function in which an error increments nvar by 1 such that every 2nd error triggers myfunction, but you removed that section of the code, now whatever crucial task myfunction does to fix the error never occurs, and the errors just continue on to oblivion. But just by looking at the code, it would be hard to diagnose that.

Thus, the programmer's aren't blamed more often, they just have to do more work to find the problem before thy can even begin to fix it, thus it seems like they are always getting asked to fix things, since they are always working.
__________________