[artK]

I've also given the quality and development of FRC controls and software a fair bit of thought. I have also thought for a while about the amount of software discussion versus mechanical, strategic and even business discussions on Chief Delphi.

I think part of it has to do with the lack of robotics programmers, both on CD and in the FRC community as a whole. A lot of teams don't have dedicated software mentors, who can teach the students the principles of software engineering (especially design patterns which allow for easily expandable code), and control theory (at the very least some feedback control, but the more the merrier). Most teams would be lucky to get a computer science teacher who generally teaches the basics (which are important, but doesn't necessarily lead to good software design). This leaves the upperclassmen, who may not have years of programming experience joining the team, to teach the lowerclassmen, with leadership changing every year or two.

A reason for a lack of mentors with experience in robotics software may be due to the lack of exposure of computer science and software engineering students to the field, usually until grad school or dedicated robotics programs like WPI or Waterloo have, which don't have a huge output of people. And the difference between robotics software from what CS and SE students typically work with that plunging in head first is intimidating enough that they never give robotics much thought.

Additionally, I bet a lot of students use other websites not only to help debug their code, but to copy and paste code from a website, which doesn't lead as much learning. I would like to see somebody try and copy/paste a CAD model.