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Unread 02-07-2014, 09:34
MrRoboSteve MrRoboSteve is offline
Mentor
AKA: Steve Peterson
FRC #3081 (Kennedy RoboEagles)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Rookie Year: 2011
Location: Bloomington, MN
Posts: 581
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Re: C# and .NET for FRC on RoboRIO

Selecting an "alternative" programming language is a tradeoff -- while you get the opportunity to learn something new, you lose the large amount of support resources that are available for the three supported languages. For most teams, that tradeoff isn't worth it. And, even for teams that decide to go the alternate language route, it's unlikely to have any significant benefit on performance or development time -- the supported alternatives have those bases covered.

A more impactful use of teams' time would be to collaborate on developing an open source library, built on top of WPILib, that automates common robot tasks. Students would learn API design, which is a higher level skill than learning a language. The FRC community would benefit from having a shared codebase, developed and refined over the years, that would help more teams build more sophisticated robots.
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2016-17 events: 10000 Lakes Regional, Northern Lights Regional, FTC Burnsville Qualifying Tournament

2011 - present · FRC 3081 Kennedy RoboEagles mentor
2013 - present · event volunteer at 10000 Lakes Regional, Northern Lights Regional, North Star Regional, Lake Superior Regional, Minnesota State Tournament, PNW District 4 Glacier Peak, MN FTC, CMP
http://twitter.com/MrRoboSteve · www.linkedin.com/in/speterson