Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat
I like the motive of the guys behind the autonomous SDK stuff, but really, it won't help in the long run... Building things from scratch builds character.
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I like your motive too David, but really, programming a full autonomous robot, won't help others in the long run...
With regards to building character, there is no undergraduate CS curriculum that says okay you have no education, go figure it out, then we'll talk. Don't worry it will build your character. The goal of an ADK is not to build character, but provide a platform on which to provide an education for programmers of all skill levels.
Even within programming, there are many types of programmers. I can tell you are a low-level programmer, and that's awesome. Personally I hate it and suck at it. I am better at the high-level design and architecture. Many colleges split up their CS departments into several concentrations for this very reason. So please note that what you view as building character for you, may be time that could be better spent for someone else.
That's the beauty of soft eng, you learn to utilize several people on a team and leverage their strengths, rather force them into their weaknesses. I have the utmost respect for low level programmers, because it's something I just can't do, but in the same sense many low level programmers aren't great at the managerial and high level tasks required on a group programming task. As Mark Jung the founder of IGN said "Great doers don't always make great managers" We should all play to our strengths and realize rather than one of us being right, we are probably both wrong (and right) all depending on the context.
I agree with you, that doing stuff from the bottom up will give you an experience you otherwise wouldn't have. But also realize working from an existing complex architecture could also give you an experience you otherwise wouldn't have.
For example if you were to try to break up the task your are trying to achieve right now to a team of 5 programmers (much like what would happen in a real programming environment) many things would be different. In my soft eng class I had to lead a team of 15 students, and had to learn all about their strengths and individual work ethic before I could delegate the work. There's a certain amount of character building that occurs when you work on a project and just have to trust what someone else is doing will work.
PS... If you hope to use your code in competition, please remember to open source everything you do before the build season.