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Unread 13-05-2011, 02:34
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WizenedEE WizenedEE is offline
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AKA: Adam
FRC #3238 (Cyborg Ferrets)
Team Role: Leadership
 
Join Date: Jan 2011
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Posts: 395
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Re: Who to Choosing Between programming language?

When building a robot for a personal project recently, I used labview to debug a lot of its problems. I spent a few days getting the serial connection to work, but after that I could look at the signals the robot was getting and what it was outputting on a graph and managed to figure it all out. I feel this is one of the real strengths of labview.

Another part of labview that I really liked was that I didn't need to put in anything to debug. By "probing" wires, you can see what its value is, and you can even see what function it is currently executing. That means that even if you don't think that you will need to look at a value, ever, you can still look at it without any recompiling, redownloading, or anything.

However, labview is also very slow. Downloading it takes a long time, starting it takes a long time, and, worst of all, uploading code takes a long time. This means that, if there's a problem, you can't just throw something onto the robot, you have to wait about a minute for it to load.

Another thing I don't like is that it is completely closed sourse, and, even worse, expensive. That means that after I get out of FRC, I pretty much won't be able to use it until I get a job. Also, you can only use computers with labview on it to write code, unlike in text-based languages.