New Robot Control System!

[JesseK]

I hope to god it's not Java-based.

Java on an embedded system is horribly bloated and slow compared to other programming languages and techniques. It's also very very easy to create memory leaks when you have several different software/hardware packages that you're trying to integrate together. So some might see Java as a blessing for an easier language to program/debug in, but the catch is that it will be terribly slower unless the processing speed is that much vastly greater.

For you Java programmers, see if you can create any sort of code for your current drive train using event handlers, enums (Java 1.5+), and other nifty dynamic things that Java allows (like the Math functions). Then force the code to perform an exception in the Event queue (easiest one is a null-pointer exception on state data that you expect to be there but isn't there). That 25-line stack trace is enough to convince me that this language is too bloated for the simple things we're trying to do.