Java vs Labview

[David Lame]

Originally Posted by wt200999

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.

Well, LabVIEW is certainly capable of doing anything any other language is capable of, so it isn't a question of capability.

The thing is that if you have to go beyond the basics of LabVIEW, then you have to learn beyond the basics of LabVIEW, and that tends to chip away at the great benefit of LabVIEW, which is its ease of use and quick learning curve.

Of course that "learning curve" thing is highly variable depending on who is doing the teaching. If you have a good instructor available who knows how to do sophisticated things in LabVIEW, then the students' learning curve gets easier.

Each language has its own set of benefits and disadvantages, so there is no "this is the right way" of doing things. When our team decided to make the change from LabVIEW to Java, one of my great fears was uncaught exceptions turning the robot into a brick. Null pointers and missing break statements have caused very bad things to happen to our robot since we went to Java. We caught most of those in testing, but it did bite us rather hard in one match when a quick change in the pits left us stranded for most of a match one time this season.