KOP Contest (Cash Prizes for FRC teams)

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I suspect some people might be interested in languages that are a little more generally applicable and not so tightly bound to a specific vendor's hardware.

I don't know what you're trying to imply, Kevin. LabVIEW is a very capable general-purpose language that runs on a wide variety of hardware. I'm using it right now on a system built around an Intel CPU and sold by Dell Computer. Around the corner from me it's running on a generic AMD-based box running Windows XP, and I've seen it used on Apple Macintoshes and on HP systems with Linux. And we all know it runs on the CompactRIO.

And from a pedagogical standpoint, Labview hides a lot of details that are important for a budding computer scientist to learn. It's certainly useful for many things, but it's not a great stepping stone to any other programming languages.

If FRC were a computer science competition, I'd be agreeing with you wholeheartedly. But it isn't a computer science competition, any more than it's a materials science or RF design or metallurgical competition. We're mostly giving students exposure to and experience with good use of appropriate tools and materials. We're not really expecting them to learn the details of tool design, are we?

It's arguably true that LabVIEW is not a particularly effective language for teaching low-level CS concepts, but LabVIEW programmers are certainly able to take advantage of those concepts, and it's a fantastic language for use by domain experts who don't happen to be expert programmers.