[Bethie42]

Glad to find this thread. Our team has a little panic attack going on: our lead programmer graduated last year, and this year's programmer may or may not be on the team after all. There's really no-one else who knows how to program, with the exception of our mentor who says 'You really don't want me to program', and me, who loves to tool around with programming but really knows nothing...

We have a load of new [not all freshmen] students this year, and several of them have expressed interest in learning to program [C++ probably]. We're making plans for a winter-break intensive study-programming course, but need to find a teacher/really good tutorial...

And then, now that our lead programmer may not be on the team, we obviously need one person who really knows what they're doing. It's looking like I may be stepping up to the plate on that [our school is sadly lacking in programmers].

So! I've done a bit with C++, trying to teach myself on my own, but I haven't usually gotten very far due to lack of time. And I know almost nothing about programming for an FRC robot: just the sample programs in C++ books. Is it possible to learn C++ well enough over the few weeks of winter break [plus build season] to be able to do reasonably well?

I know all y'all lifelong programmers are going to say it takes years to get really good at a text-based language...


Another thing that came up was LabVIEW. Apparently it's a lot easier to learn that quickly, than C++ or Java. [I've worked with NXT programming for FLL, not that that is terribly similar.] I would personally rather learn C++ for several reasons, but I also really want to make sure we have people besides me [a senior] who know how to program for next year, and perhaps LabVIEW would be a better option for them?

On the other hand, there are a lot of other local FRC teams and they all program in C++ or Java, so finding help would be easier with either of those.

I'd love to hear your input on this! [I.e. I am begging for help! ]