On the quality and complexity of software within FRC

[Pault]

I can agree that compared to the CD ME community, the CD programming community really does not do nearly as good of a job at encouraging and helping teams improve their code beyond just making sure they understand the fundamentals and their code works. There is very little talk about making code flexible, or features that could be added, etc. All of the threads are something like either "What programming language should I use?", "Where do I go to learn how to code in X language?", "Why does this code not work?", "What is a PID?", etc. I think it could really benefit the teams on here if there was more in depth conversation.

Your being very harsh on the average team, though. Just like with mechanical and electrical, the goal of many programming teams is just to "make it work well enough for us to get picked for eliminations." Many of them dont even have a coding mentor, and rely pretty much exclusively on the resources online to figure out how to write basic code. I don't think we need to be criticizing them because their code is not as robust as we would expect from our own teams, they are struggling to get it to work at all.