[Kevin Sevcik]

Here's a thought on the abstraction vs. bare metal programming split. I think it works out exactly like anything else on the robot. For a transmission you can either design your own from the ground up, cookbook one up out of a DeWalt, or buy one from AndyMark. These are sorted by decreasing time and effort and increasing knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the systems. Each of these approaches has its place in the mechanical design of the robot, and I fail to see why they shouldn't all have a place in the programming of the robot. There will be times when bare metal programming is the best or only way to accomplish something, but should we really force every team to build everything from scratch? I think the teams should really have the option of piecing together all three kinds of code as best suits them. Near as I can tell at the moment, the only options are either an entire AndyMark robot (EasyC) or an entire cookbooked and from scratch robot.