Quote:
Originally posted by Jon Lawton
Java? ...why? Granted, I would perfer Java over PBASIC, but why not Lisp, SmallTalk, or C? Java was created to develop cross-platform applications with ease, and to introduce the concept of "applets," right? Why must Java be put to use in systems that do not benefit from this? Platform-Independance is hardly an issue with what we deal with. But, hmm... if it were, couldn't one create a VM for his or her language of choice? (Just (my '(Bit Bit)))
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Why Java? Java is great in the embedded market. Check out J2ME (at
http://java.sun.com/). The platform independence is useful because of the myriad different platforms being used in the embedded market today. Java also happens to be fairly easy to learn (it's used in the basic CS courses here at RIT) and the AP test will be switching to Java next year; so there happens to be a fairly large group of people knowledgable about Java.
Now as to why not LISP (either Common LISP or Scheme) or Smalltalk: neither are used in wide scale development. This means that the market for such devices is very small. As for why to not pick C, C is a fairly difficult language to learn and it's also not Object Oriented. You could use C++ but C++ is an extremely large and complex language. It also happens to be missing some of the standard functionality that is included in Java. It also doesn't have a feature subset that's targetted to embedded devices (a la J2ME).
Personally, I'd love to see us switch to the J-Stamp. It seems to be orders of magnitude better than the Basic Stamp 2x that is currenlty used. While there may be some workarounds to common problems with the Basic Stamps, there are more significant architecture problems (limits to RAM, limits to speed, no signed math, no floating point math, etc.) that cannot be overcome. If we were to be able to move past that, the programming part of this competition would be much more extensive and enhance the ability of programmer and the ilk to enjoy the FIRST competition.
Matt