[Racer26]

I would have posted this in programming, but its not really a programming question.

Do you think the increasing amount of pre-canned code (in the form of WPILib and all its flavours) is helping or hurting the effectiveness of young teams?

I've seen quite a few teams this year, asking for help with LabVIEW, and specifically the Holonomic.vi. I think what has started to happen, is that these teams are seeing both the veterans, and the code that makes such drive systems seem easy, and jumping on the bandwagon before really understanding how these systems work.

A similar effect has happened with the cameras.

If you hand teams code on a silver platter, they often don't understand WHY it works. Which causes problems when something breaks and it stops working, because they can't know how to fix it if they don't understand how it works.

Obviously some form of default code is required, but should we really be handing out PID algorithms, and holonomic drive code, and so forth? I don't know, but I think its causing some younger teams to get in over their heads with advanced systems, such as holonomic drive platforms. I can see this causing problems come competition when something breaks and no one knows why. It also causes increased questions directed to veteran teams about how to code this type of thing when they can't get it to work right away, because they don't fully understand what they're doing. This much, I think is a good thing, as it results in the younger team learning some more advanced concepts from teams who've done it successfully before.

(Note: I'm not picking specifically on holonomic drives, they are just an easy example of the concept I'm referring to.)