Quote:
Originally Posted by efoote868
<bit of background>
I started coding in middle school with BlitzBasic, a pretty funky language geared towards making small games.
I'm in CS AP AB right now, so I know some java
I started coding last year, with the edubot, this year I'm one of the main programmers
I got my first taste of easyC when our team's mentor bought a copy of the vex programming kit, and it was easyC. I didn't have a good time with it, and now I don't like vex too much, either 
</bit of background>
To me, MPLAB is one of the worst IDEs. Quite frankly, it makes programming in C a pain, especially for robotics. That idea alone is enough to get some to switch over to easyC.
However, as bad as MPLAB is, to me, easyC is worse. I took the program, installed the free copy on my laptop, and tried opening it, and tried to mess around with it (the way I learned MPLAB). Although I could view the source code, I couldn't find a way to get it copied over to a plain text, that I could edit elsewhere.
As a true computer nerd, I prefer the keyboard as input to the mouse. Clicking in excess is annoying to me, and the thing just doesn't flow right. Thats a personal opinion, I understand everyone is entitled to theirs (and I respect your opinions).
The final straw was when we learned how much a set of easyC cost, and combined, it drove us away from it.
As far as bragging about whipping up code in easyC in 1/10th the time it takes for me to hard code it, good luck in the real world. If you're that fast at easyC, perhaps you should take the time to type it yourself, you'll learn better (and if you do know C that well, then you're obviously entitled to an opinion  ).
best of luck coding!
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First of all Easy C is free to FRC teams, Intellitek donates licenses for the teams.
I agree about MPLAB being terrible, there are other ide's that you can use and still hard code.
While saying it takes 1/10th of the time to use easy c may be an exaggeration it is allot faster, and trust me I do more than enough other work in c/c++ to not be losing a chance for learning more (and I am sure that all of the professional engineers who use it do way more programming than I do) by typing every thing out, once you reach the point where you understand what Easy C is doing there is no reason not to let it do it for you. I could also machine robot parts by hand but why bother if I have a CNC that can do it easier faster and better, FIRST is handing us a tool, why not use it?