Java vs Labview

[wt200999]

Originally Posted by David Lame

You could do that all with a filmstrip in LabView.

Originally Posted by David Lame

That conditional loop is very straightforward in a high level language, but harder in labview. You end up with filmstips inside filmstrips, or custom VIs.
It is not awful. It's not incredibly hard, but your code ends up with a bunch of nested diagrams that are not easy to decipher.

And then on top of that, we had a bunch of conditional statements for stability control, adjusting wheel speeds to prevent tipping. Reading and substituting PID values in certain cases, but not in others. Those nested if-thens are easy in Java. The LabView code gets pretty ugly.

What you describe does sound awful, it sounds like you are trying to take LabVIEW and turn it into a sequential language. Just because using the film strip works doesn't mean its the only way you can write your code in LabVIEW. In fact I would say the sequence structure is one of the worst features in LabVIEW and is a relic of older versions and methodologies.

If you want to move to more advanced LabVIEW code, don't use the film strip, especially as your main architecture. What you describes sounds like a perfect fit for a more parallel implementation, and the main auton flow a better fit for a simple state machine structure.

Originally Posted by David Lame

So, my summary is that if you want to use your code to drive the robot and manipulate the actuators, LabView probably works. If you want to start doing fancy computation, move to Java.

I completely disagree with this premise. LabVIEW is great for any level of sophistication you may find in FIRST. However, to achieve this you must go beyond the basics of LabVIEW.