Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike Soukup
C is an industry standard with compilers for hundreds of chips while labview is a propriety language supported by a single company. We'd rather not teach the students a language that locks them into a single supplier.
|
To further illustrate this point, everyone should note that your Labview license will expire in January 2010. If you don't continue in FRC next year and therefore don't get a new license, all the Labview code you write this year will probably be worthless after that date. Workbench expires too, but since it is C++ code, it can be recompiled with a number of different compilers (including the original compiler that Wind River uses since it's GCC).
The temporary license we're being given to these tools this year is a dirty little secret that I don't see a lot of discussion about. It's another way that we're being short-changed with the new control system (in addition to no longer getting a new one each year). Consider the case in a few years where perhaps they switch to a new control system, and move away from National Instruments. If that happens, then at that point all the robot code that teams have written in Labview will no longer be maintainable unless those teams go off and buy their own Labview license. Maybe this isn't a big deal to most, but we do occasionally go modify the code on our old robots as we use them to test out ideas for a new season, etc.
In short, vendor lock-in == bad IMO.