Chosing a Programming Language

[F22Rapture]

Originally Posted by apalrd

While this might be true for "desktop" programming (the kind taught by most Comp Sci programs), I respectfully disagree.

LabVIEW is used a lot in industry for what it was originally designed for - instrumentation and testing. Many test setups I know of use NI hardware and run LabVIEW code. LV is an important skill for many engineers who aren't CS's.

LabVIEW is also an extremely powerful language. There is nothing that I know of that is simply impossible (although a few things are tricky). The FIRST libraries are also fairly easy to use from a users perspective (although there are a few design quirks that are clear marks of different code authors not collaborating closely enough - "To Digital Source" for encoders is a great example).

I also don't see any reason why Java or C++ would be harder to debug than the other - Your basically limited to printf's/language equivalents in any form, and most FRC operations don't touch pointer math so you shouldn't get segfaults with no explanation (which are almost always the worst to debug).

Fair enough, I'm well aware that LabView is very well-used in embedded and analytical systems, but my point was that for the majority of students a more conventional programming language would probably be more useful. Java, C++, and C# are 3 of the most-used languages on the planet, and they're all quite similar in many respects.

As for debugging, I probably generalized a bit more than I should have, though Java does have a few extra debugging features such as printstacktrace()