[CircularLogic]

This rule is written with no possible way to enforce it, so technical legal obligation are meaningless in this argument.

It seems that the spirit of the rule is to encourage learning and development by writing fresh software every year instead of having one good programmer write code that you can pretty much use every year.


My answer to the last question of "is it acceptable to dodge a rule you simply dont like" is yes. I do believe that too many people are into the cult of FIRST rather than the actual issue of the things they are supposed to teach, i.e. technical expertise, programming expertise, or actual robotics. Following this type of rule to the letter represents being too caught up with the organization of FIRST and not necessarily what it teaches.

Rule violations will always happen, unitentional and intentional. Things break, changes in the pit almost always leave with some type of violations, and some teams have to knowingly use a diffent gauge wire when they only have 3 minutes to fix it, but that not the point. The point of this program is not to pay incredible attention and respect the infallibility of FIRST, but to learn from it. When people are too caught up in the cult of FIRST, I feel that we miss the important parts of the program as in the actual robotics part of it.




Anyway, that was kind of off topic, but it is the observations of a person who was always into the team and into the robotics, but never really a huge fan of the FIRST cult.

p.s. I always copy and paste lines of code. Its quite annoying to have to write entire drive algorithms over again when you have the same drive train.