What is Easy C good for?

[Doug Leppard]

All I am saying is that we were a heavy MPLab team years before, switched to easyc pro this year and got a lot of work done.

Using mplab is great, but don't down play teams that use easyc pro. The orignal question was "What is Easyc good for?" We had the camera, gyro, quad encoders and IRs all working with easyc and felt we could develop faster using it and more important pass it on to our new team members.

Often what is a "best" is one of preference. All I am saying is easyc pro helped gives us a winning bot. Could we have done it in MPlab, YES!

But we decided easyc pro not only does not hold us back (one of our fears when we started), but made it easier for us.

[Stvn]

For me, I found EasyC annoying for more advanced programming because the block icons were too large, you had to drag in every single line of code, and I couldn't easily search my code. On the other hand, I've been using WPILib in MPLab, and I'm able to easily call functions to take care of reading sensors for me.

[efoote868]

<bit of background>
I started coding in middle school with BlitzBasic, a pretty funky language geared towards making small games.
I'm in CS AP AB right now, so I know some java
I started coding last year, with the edubot, this year I'm one of the main programmers

I got my first taste of easyC when our team's mentor bought a copy of the vex programming kit, and it was easyC. I didn't have a good time with it, and now I don't like vex too much, either
</bit of background>

To me, MPLAB is one of the worst IDEs. Quite frankly, it makes programming in C a pain, especially for robotics. That idea alone is enough to get some to switch over to easyC.

However, as bad as MPLAB is, to me, easyC is worse. I took the program, installed the free copy on my laptop, and tried opening it, and tried to mess around with it (the way I learned MPLAB). Although I could view the source code, I couldn't find a way to get it copied over to a plain text, that I could edit elsewhere.

As a true computer nerd, I prefer the keyboard as input to the mouse. Clicking in excess is annoying to me, and the thing just doesn't flow right. Thats a personal opinion, I understand everyone is entitled to theirs (and I respect your opinions).

The final straw was when we learned how much a set of easyC cost, and combined, it drove us away from it.

As far as bragging about whipping up code in easyC in 1/10th the time it takes for me to hard code it, good luck in the real world. If you're that fast at easyC, perhaps you should take the time to type it yourself, you'll learn better (and if you do know C that well, then you're obviously entitled to an opinion ).

best of luck coding!

[meatmanek]

Where's the option for "vim, make, and mcc18 running in wine"? Bah. You folks always forget us Linux people.

Shout out to Adambots and John Dong for making it possible.

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by efoote868

<bit of background>
I started coding in middle school with BlitzBasic, a pretty funky language geared towards making small games.
I'm in CS AP AB right now, so I know some java
I started coding last year, with the edubot, this year I'm one of the main programmers

I got my first taste of easyC when our team's mentor bought a copy of the vex programming kit, and it was easyC. I didn't have a good time with it, and now I don't like vex too much, either
</bit of background>

To me, MPLAB is one of the worst IDEs. Quite frankly, it makes programming in C a pain, especially for robotics. That idea alone is enough to get some to switch over to easyC.

However, as bad as MPLAB is, to me, easyC is worse. I took the program, installed the free copy on my laptop, and tried opening it, and tried to mess around with it (the way I learned MPLAB). Although I could view the source code, I couldn't find a way to get it copied over to a plain text, that I could edit elsewhere.

As a true computer nerd, I prefer the keyboard as input to the mouse. Clicking in excess is annoying to me, and the thing just doesn't flow right. Thats a personal opinion, I understand everyone is entitled to theirs (and I respect your opinions).

The final straw was when we learned how much a set of easyC cost, and combined, it drove us away from it.

As far as bragging about whipping up code in easyC in 1/10th the time it takes for me to hard code it, good luck in the real world. If you're that fast at easyC, perhaps you should take the time to type it yourself, you'll learn better (and if you do know C that well, then you're obviously entitled to an opinion ).

best of luck coding!

First of all Easy C is free to FRC teams, Intellitek donates licenses for the teams.

I agree about MPLAB being terrible, there are other ide's that you can use and still hard code.

While saying it takes 1/10th of the time to use easy c may be an exaggeration it is allot faster, and trust me I do more than enough other work in c/c++ to not be losing a chance for learning more (and I am sure that all of the professional engineers who use it do way more programming than I do) by typing every thing out, once you reach the point where you understand what Easy C is doing there is no reason not to let it do it for you. I could also machine robot parts by hand but why bother if I have a CNC that can do it easier faster and better, FIRST is handing us a tool, why not use it?

[Astronouth7303]

So is EasyC great because of the drag&drop (something you can't readily get other ways) or because of WPILib (which is available no matter what you use)?

Like for this year, I used something I decided to call JAS (Jamie's Autonomous Scripting -- real creative, I know). It was inspired by Kevin's Navigation code (in concept). After you create the underlying mechanism support (Something that has to be done, and can be used in driver mode if done right), writing autonomous modes is very easy. And because of the way it is structured, you don't need to worry about loops and state machines in much of the code.

Now, how does that compare to EasyC and WPILib? I can't say I have used EasyC enough to say. None of them, though, really help you develop robust, modular code (at least the way I would like to see it -- centered around mechanisms and that driver mode/autonomous mode are just 2 users of this mechanism API).

Another discussion is how to implement features like Kevin's camera and tracking menus & EEPROM values. Stuff like that is very easy to work with on the user side, and I would like to see more stuff like it in some form.

Bottom lines: Almost anything is better than MPLAB. There's other stuff out there other than WPILib. Try writing something yourself.

[JohnC]

Originally Posted by JamesBrown

why not use it?

Maybe for newbies, but it seems the general consensus is that c programmers have a hard time making easyC work just the way they want it to. After all, it should be called "code" for a reason.

One of my complaints is that if I have to change some big structural part of my code, it takes forever in easyC.