Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat
Well this year is my first year of doing robotics, and I was actually quite surprised... They did pretty much half the work for you, they made you a library and edge detection for you. Well I was hoping that we had to make it from scratch and they just provided the library for the very low level stuff, I noticed its really high level programming you need to do. I haven't really started, I just look through the libraries but I think it takes away from the experience... You can argue that its only 6 weeks and is by highschool students, but still...
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I felt that way once - in 2005, when in my first year in FRC on a rookie team. I was pretty confident in my C programming skills, and when they talked about how much code was being prepackaged, I was a little disappointed.
Now, as someone who's been involved with the programming since 2005, trust me, it's harder than it looks. They've given us some "it should work out of the box" code nearly every year, and almost no one uses it. Almost no one does the great things the GDC hopes for. No matter what they package for us, programming the robot is still hard.
Does giving the teams large libraries take away from "the experience"? I don't think so. Think about it: suppose you're writing a simple GUI for some program. You don't look up how to write to the screen memory buffer, or write font handling code from scratch. You use a library that's already been written. That's the awesome thing about Java, Python, PHP, MATLAB, and LabVIEW (to name just a few). All of these languages have extensive built-in libraries to do all kinds of things. It makes us programmers more productive, and lets us spend our time working on the fun problems, rather than slogging through the swamp of low-level code.
Don't worry that you'll run out of interesting coding work to do. If you like playing around with low-level stuff, try adding some new sensors, such as an optical mouse. Or devise an automated system to assist the drivers in possessing balls. Or create an autonomous mode program that will make everyone's jaw drop. The options are truly limitless.