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Unread 10-04-2010, 00:05
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Test Engineer
AKA: Marshal Horn
FRC #3213 (Thunder Tech)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: May 2008
Rookie Year: 2008
Location: Tacoma
Posts: 894
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Re: I don't think being a rookie team has any effect on the programmers

Honestly, I'm not trying to make headway in autonomous so rookies can do it better; I'm doing it because I'm appalled at the lack of autonomous in FRC, and I want to make it easier for EVERYONE, including myself.
My basic goal is to bring the coding of autonomous up high-level enough where people can say "go forward until even x happens", instead of having to create a loop themselves and poll that data.
If you've ever used Applescript, you may notice it's plain English.
Okay, all the sentences have a fixed form, but it's really easy to understand, and it's pretty easy to think it. When people are new to programming, they don't automatically translate "wait until this button is pressed" into "poll this input in a loop, and stop if the value is true".
I'd like to make it have the simplicity of NXT-G, but with much more power and configurability. It's not low-level tasks are what make someone a software architect, it's the structuring of how tasks rely on eachother.

In addition to this, I'd like to be able to modify a canned autonomous by just modifying a text file. No recompiling, no redeploying. (I could even make a bug-checker for the file to see if it would be interpreted properly)
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Last edited by kamocat : 10-04-2010 at 00:09.