Quote:
Originally Posted by JBotAlan
Umm...FIRST shipped the WINDOWS version of LabVIEW. AFAIK the other OS versions have to be ordered separately and are separate licenses. Those licenses are not cheap.
|
Yeah, you're right, if you walked to your local sales office and tried to pick up a copy of LabVIEW it'd cost you several thousand dollars. However, National Instruments feels FIRST teams shouldn't pay a penny for LabVIEW, and so far that's how we've handled that situation. Teams who want a copy of LabVIEW for Linux or for the Mac merely have to ask for the specific operating system version. We had a thread over in the National Instruments LabVIEW topic in the Technical section where some had asked for the Linux and/or Mac version, and we told 'em where to send the e-mail requests; everyone who asked got their copies, some even got upgrades when the upgrades came out...
Quote:
|
It would be fun to experiment, but when all is said and done, I am much happier coding in C.
|
I'm sure you're not the only one, primarily because that's "what you're most familiar with." I recently had a very "rich" discussion with a group of 7th graders who wanted to program their LEGO Mindstorms robots with Java, and their primary rationale was because "it's what everyone programs in nowadays." So I asked them how rich their library set was, how quickly they could get a program up and running, how easy it was to debug, how extensive it was, and questions like this to try to get them thinking about the things that would be important to consider. Their immediate reaction was one of, "but I KNOW Java, I have used it FOREVER, I don't want to learn a new language!" Those are all good reasons for a 7th grader to stick with when programming a LEGO Mindstorms robot, but is it the best one for an engineering competition such as FRC? I dunno, I'm still on the fence.
-Danny