I don’t know what the big deal is. Many of you have typed more characters here than it would take to program the robot – autonomous mode included. So, your displeasure with the rule can’t be about wasted typing effort. Many have pointed out that the requirements change enough from year to year so that not much, if anything, from the code can escape customization. Since the rule, as all <R> rules, must only apply to what goes in the crate on ship day, then go ahead and start with the old code. By ship day it’ll be tweaked up beyond all recognition – TUBAR.
Any code that hasn’t been touched, you can rewrite. You’ll probably find you’ve improved it, if not in function, then in the appearance.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the difference between hardware and software, especially as to why we can’t equate the two. Well, the main difference I see is that with software the raw material is infinite. We can create and destroy it with the press of a button. If we can live with leaving perfectly good hardware behind each year, then having to recreate software shouldn’t faze us a bit.
There are times when I wish the DoD had an <R71>. I often write CAE software to facilitate signature research and analysis. There are a number of dinosaurs from the eighties, usually written in Fortran, that try to predict atmospherics, bi-directional reflection, thermodynamics, and etc. I don’t know how many times management wants us to incorporate this chunk of code from the Air Force, or that from the Navy, into something we can use to predict the performance of future combat systems. They all have this joint meeting of planners, each wanting to leverage their programs, so they conclude we can just write a wrapper around stuff that may, or may not, have worked all that well to begin with. My group prefers to start from scratch with the code, to take the essence of what has been done and bring it into line with the 21st. century. So, there may be some method to the madness of <R71>. It forces us to revisit and perhaps improve upon what was done, instead of dragging along dinosaurs year after year.