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Unread 15-11-2014, 15:54
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RobotPy Guy
AKA: Dustin Spicuzza
FRC #1418 (), FRC #1973, FRC #4796, FRC #6367 ()
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Dec 2008
Rookie Year: 2003
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 1,059
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Re: 2015 Programming Languages?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Monochron View Post
I wouldn't imagine the new control system would prompt teams to switch, unless something comes out indicating an issue with one of the main three languages.
I would expect that support for the 'big three' languages would remain the same as it has been.

Quote:
Our team did Python the first two years and are now switching to Java mainly for ease of use and the ability to compile in a nice IDE. Disclaimer, I didn't actually work on programming this past year, I'm just relaying what I remember hearing from them. So take this with a grain of salt.

We ran into a lot of annoying syntax errors that would have been caught instantly by Eclipse and would have prevented us from loading obviously bad code onto the robot.
This is one of the problems with using python -- since it's dynamically typed, you have to actually test/run your code to find the syntax errors, as opposed to depending on a compiler. To help with this, one thing we introduced in the middle of the season was a robot simulator that allowed you to run your code on your laptop, which my students found quite useful for quick iterative development. Python development for 2015 is pretty active, so hopefully the community will grow more this year.
__________________
Maintainer of RobotPy - Python for FRC
Creator of pyfrc (Robot Simulator + utilities for Python) and pynetworktables/pynetworktables2js (NetworkTables for Python & Javascript)

2017 Season: Teams #1973, #4796, #6369
Team #1418 (remote mentor): Newton Quarterfinalists, 2016 Chesapeake District Champion, 2x Innovation in Control award, 2x district event winner
Team #1418: 2015 DC Regional Innovation In Control Award, #2 seed; 2014 VA Industrial Design Award; 2014 Finalists in DC & VA
Team #2423: 2012 & 2013 Boston Regional Innovation in Control Award


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