No offence people, but i think this conversation is the slightest bit slanted, as to how mostly programmers are on CD in the off-season
. That being said, I've really wondered what it is like to be one of the programmers, I'm just glad I'm not one of them, as our team is very evil to them and gives them about 3- days to program the thing. Most of the programing done while we're building is "preparation code" that they run on past year's bot to test their programming with. And I'm pretty certain we're not the only team...
Eventually we hope to be like one of those teams that manage to build their bot in the first 3 weeks and spend the last half tweaking, but a lot is going to have to happen for us to get into that position.
On the note of programmers getting more time. Like any other aspect of the bot, all of the parts are vital to get it to work but when it comes down to it, teams need to decide which aspects get that bit of extra time and energy to improve. And this year, since the main challenge of the game was a pushing match, and a very difficult arm design, most teams spent a lot of time on that instead of on the autonomous code which many teams thought was just too much effort for the payoff (two more tetras? In finals the bots could do that in about 12 seconds
I think FIRST could encourage more autonomous programming, or time spent on creating it, by making it more central to the game. In '04 knocking the ball off was an incredibly useful auto code, that gave teams a killer advantage. But this season, we all know that wasn't quite the case
.
If FIRST would come out with a game that gave a difficult challenge in autonomous programming, one that would make a team considerably more powerful in a game (moreso than this year, it wasn't impossible, just very very difficult, for a very small payoff) a lot more teams would be giving more time to the programmers.
Anyway that's my $0.02