On the quality and complexity of software within FRC

[efoote868]

On a one-off project, if I have a specific set of tasks and I'm writing serial code that must execute once every 20 milliseconds, why should I care if it takes 2 microseconds or 10 milliseconds to execute?

If I have 512 MB of memory available, why should I care if I use 10 kb or 300 MB, so long as it holds everything I need and works the way I want it to?


Particularly in one-off projects where I'm not designing to value, more important than smallest, absolute fastest, most efficient is code readability and "it just works." If I have 10 hours to write and test code to fit a spec, you'd better believe I'm spending about 8-9 hours testing my code to make sure it works. If I spend any time optimizing, that is time not spent testing.

I understand that if I'm manufacturing 100 million widgets and I can save a fraction of a cent on manufacturing PCB or hardware specs I'm doing it, but if I'm doing just one prototype, cost is not my motivating factor.