On the quality and complexity of software within FRC

[Ari423]

I'm afraid I have to agree with OP. I am the head (and only) programmer on my team, and have been so for the past 3 years, so I have a lot of experience with programming for FRC.

I will be the first to admit programming is hard to do well, but I think some teams just aren't putting enough effort to make their code efficient. Just today on CD I saw a piece of code (which I will leave unnamed) that almost brought my eyes to tears in its inefficiency. Even without a programming mentor and with a 6 person team, I have always put an emphasis on code efficiency and design as well as effectiveness. Sometimes I feel as if the FRC community has taken all of the focus from programming and moved it to mechanical, and left programming as an afterthought: something that you just throw together in a few hours to make it work and then never look at again. I understand that there are multiple ways to do a single task, but some ways ARE better than others.

A good example of this is dashboards. I cannot speak to programming a Java or C++ dashboard, but I know that making a dashboard in LabVIEW is easy to do, relatively speaking. Every year, after I finish the robot code and control panel, while I am waiting for the robot to be ready to test on, I program a dashboard that shows the important information coming from the robot, and adds other inputs than those on the control panel (trims, resets, etc). It usually looks something like this:

It doesn't take long to make, makes debugging much easier, and generally looks nice. We don't always use all of the displays, but they is at least one display for every aspect of the robot code. However, I often see much larger and more advanced teams who use LabVIEW but either don't have a dashboard, use the default dash, or make a custom dash with only a few numerical outputs. I don't understand; maybe someone can explain this to me. With the customizability given to you, why not make a dashboard suited to your needs that is easy to read and looks nice?

tl;dr Why is programming becoming an afterthought in the FRC community?