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Originally Posted by AtalanteStar25
I have to agree with David on this one. As a programmer, I have witnessed how much time, effort, and frustration it takes to maybe even get a small part of the robot working. You write some code, test it, change it, test it again, etc. This could go on for hours. How is it fair to that team that sits there writing and testing the code to post it online for anyone to see?
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I certainly understand where you're coming from here. It can be very frustrating, but I think you're reacting from that frustration. Let me make a couple points.
My favorite language of all time (so far) is Java. For those who don't know, Java is a language that has huge libraries of pre-written code. People from all over the world submit their code to Sun so that it will be included in the next Java version. What's the point? I would say that it's rather like building a pyramid. You can't start with the top layer. You must start at the bottom and build up. Before you can write a game with orcs that attack humans (à la Warcraft) you must first know how to display an orc on the screen, how to get information from the user, and about 1000 other pieces of information. If every time someone wrote a computer game they had to come up with new code to read data from the keyboard, complex games would never evolve because everyone would be too busy building the bottom layer of the pyramid over and over again.
The other point is that no-one is forcing teams to post their code. I myself would have no problem posting my code online for others to use. In fact, if I knew I were doing this, it might go a long way towards encouraging me to better document my code.
Paul