What Language To Use?

[flameout]

In 2010, we started off using Java. However, we wanted to use the camera tracking code, and somewhere in the native libraries or WPILibj, it was crashing (I recall getting some sort of error in Netbeans's debug console).

Therefore, early on, we switched to LabVIEW. This worked great, until the end of build season, at which point... -- the camera stopped working again (after updating the cRIO image). We also experienced issues with code downloads (the only available workaround was to reimage before every download).

As our code that year was relatively simple (because the default vision worked out of the box), it was within our capabilities to have coded in both languages (and C++ too, for that matter). Had we done so, we could've switched languages away from LabVIEW -- likely solving the code download issue (since Java and C++ use FTP, and LabVIEW doesn't AFAIK) as well as possibly restoring camera function.

I am considering writing code in multiple languages this year -- even if we only get vision (assuming it exists in the next game) working in one or two languages, it'll still be driveable should we encounter a killer bug in one of the cRIO's images.

Of course, this means nothing if you don't have programming time to spare -- after choosing a "main" language, don't sacrifice the quality or performance of your main code just to work on the backups.

Just my 2¢.