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Unread 25-03-2010, 16:42
Dave Flowerday Dave Flowerday is offline
Software Engineer
VRC #0111 (Wildstang)
Team Role: Engineer
 
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Re: Driver station coding and other

Quote:
Originally Posted by eagle33199 View Post
The average student can write and download code to the robot without running into any hassles, which was NOT true about the old IFI system (there were times with that system where i would be forced to bang my head for several hours just to get code to download... then do it all over again the following week!).
There's a lot of people around here that will disagree with you on this statement, including me. The IFI system is alive and well in the VEX world (the VEX microcontroller is very similar to the IFI RC used by FRC in the past), and thousands of students all over the world use it successfully. So, I'd say that "the average student" is able to work with the IFI stuff just fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eagle33199 View Post
As for not using IDEs and only makefiles... you really don't know what you're missing out on. makefiles are handy, I use them all the time... but you really do need an IDE once your project gets past a certain size. Imagine trying to work on a project with several thousand files and millions of lines of code... you aren't going to do that with VI.
I do that every day at Motorola, along with hundreds or thousands of other engineers here. I've worked with several different groups here, and all the products I've worked on have been built from a command line with make (and they've all had 1000s of files and millions of lines of code). Makefiles are very stable - we can build code that's 20 years old here without issue. If we did everything in an IDE, we'd have very little chance of being able to build our current projects 20 years in the future, when whatever IDE of choice today is long gone. Makefiles also make it easy to parallelize builds, which is important if it takes 6-8 hours to compile your code. Oh, and I do indeed do all my coding here with Vim, as do many others.