[taichichuan]

Good point on causality vs correlation. I added a comment to the post to that effect.

As for Java, I suspect that few wanted to be the guinea pigs on Java in the first year out. I know a few teams who did try it successfully. I'll add your team to that list.

In the embedded programming space, many of us look at Java as a great way to generate a GUI, but not as something targeting real-time controls due to memory issues, garbage collection delays, inability to access physical devices directly (e.g., no pointers) etc. That being said, the real-time Java folks have been able to get millisecond accuracy for a significant number of applications. That's likely more than fast enough for anything we're doing with FIRST.

Thanks,

Mike