While a LabVIEW-based controller would run fine, there are teams out there programming on a 350MHz laptop with a 6GB hard drive with 128MB of RAM. Try installing, let alone running, LabVIEW on that.
And LabVIEW does NOT need to install any service on my machine (a good program does not rely on them), or start anything up at startup, yet it was trying to start at least 3 processes (which I promptly disabled) at startup.
I also find that documentation on LabVIEW is extremely sparse. For C, there are *tons* of tutorials. Not so for LabVIEW. Mostly because it is so expensive.
At least before today, the MCC18 compiler could be run on any system, even Linux, through WINE. I'm 99.99% sure LabVIEW won't so as well in an emulator. What about alternate OS programmers?
I'm tired of proprietary software. I'd like to see IFI or whoever designs the new controller to *completely* open-source the whole thing. Schematics, master code, compiler, IDE, etc. That would be really nice.
If LabVIEW was quite a bit less beefy, then maybe I might go for it. However, I think that many programmers would be disabled by LabVIEW--it wouldn't install on their systems, or would crash. It's fine for industries that can afford new computers, but we are not such an industry.
It's not that I'm trying to put down LabVIEW; I believe it has applications in other areas (signal processing and simulation are two areas that come to mind) but I don't see it as suitable for FIRST.
Maybe I'm just biased by all of the nice open-source projects I've seen, but that's my 2 cents on this topic.
JBot