On the quality and complexity of software within FRC

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by marshall

That's actually a good point. I suppose there are a couple of ways to look at FRC robots. One is as a control system problem. I'm not sure many teams take the approach to look at their robots in that light. I think that has a lot to do with why LabView is often shunned by some. LabView is an absolutely amazing tool for programming control systems...

All this talk of optimization is great but I haven't seen anyone in this thread talk about profiling. It's been a while since I took the compiler optimization class that I took in college but as I recall, there were some choice readings by Donald Knuth that pointed out that pre-mature optimization is the root of all evil or something similar. Profiling helps to determine where to optimize systems and with FRC robots containing a physical component, profiling would entail looking at the code as well as the robots output and the speed/efficiency of motors and gearboxes... which as others have pointed out, is more likely to provide substantial efficiency gains.

The Software industry is really starting to move towards the Agile process of development. Over-engineering is one of the wastes of time that the Agile process tries to avoid. Why engineer to a future problem that might never happen. On the topic of this thread, why over engineer your optimization unless it is actually going to be a problem. Outside of vision, optimization isn't going to be an issue.