Team 973 Code Now Public

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by F22Rapture

The choice of Lua is interesting -- what advantages and disadvantages does it afford you over Java/C++/Python?

Ross can provide more detailed answers on the technical side, but I'll field some of the reasons.

We're a small team, in a community that doesn't really prepare kids at all in technical fields. It's not uncommon for a student to have never used email before joining the team. It is rare we have any students coming in with programming experience, and more rare that we even have kids interested in programming (this last season and the upcoming season we have a few, which is a refreshing change of pace). Also, for random and unrelated reasons, we've had huge turnover in students interested in programming, 2013 will be the first season since 2008 that a student programmer participated the previous year.

Throw that all together with the fact that our mentorship is low, and it's HARD to get kids trained as programmers.

The barrier to entry with Lua is just lower than a language like C++. Students spend more time problem solving and doing the real tasks that programming is, and less time focusing on syntax and variable types. Ross is a computer science major (and I'm a minor in it), so we both understand the importance of these skills, but we believe they will learn these skills down the road in whatever college program they choose. We're more interested in just getting them to program (as programming in anything is better than not doing it at all), and letting them spend more time per hour coding on the high level tasks and logic problems.

It's worked well for us in that regard.