Quote:
Originally Posted by x86_4819
Although I would generally agree with this, python actually helped my team out of a situation like this.
At my team's first competition, I had made some last-minute tweaks to the robot's drive code right before we left for a practice match. Autonomous runs, then I grab the joystick for teleop only to find my drive controls accelerated and inverted. Not from a syntax error, but a missing "-" and an extra "0" in the perfectly-valid python code. However, because I was using python, it only took about 30 seconds (mid-match) for me to ssh into the robot, modify the offending file, and re-load the code in order for us to continue practicing.
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That's fantastic.
Python definitely is very good for quick iteration -- though, I think the roborio has made redeployment of all code a lot easier.
There's definitely a lot of risk when using interpreted languages, but a lot of that risk can be mitigated by things like writing unit tests, using simulators, and the like -- which really, we should be teaching our students how to do that stuff anyways. This is why I've made sure that RobotPy has first-class support for unit testing and simulation. I've been using Python on robots since 2011, and teams I've worked with have never had a robot die in a match because of a syntax error.