Travesty: Is EasyC Too Easy?

[Alan Anderson]

For someone who does not know how to program, I think easyC can be a very useful tool. But for an accomplished programmer, I think the answer is clearly "Yes, easyC is too easy."

Originally Posted by Kingofl337

If you would like a little more challenge you can swap into the text editor and create all your functions manually.

When we swapped to the text view it wouldn't let us type anything. The help system wasn't much help for that issue -- it's fantastic for explaining how to use the built-in program blocks, but it doesn't address going beyond them.

Originally Posted by TubaMorg

EasyC just removes the neccesity of knowing syntax.

It does a whole lot more than that. It hides the entire IFI control system implementation behind a GUI and a collection of building blocks. That makes it amazingly simple to use joysticks to drive a robot, or to use quadrature encoders to track shaft rotations, or to control the air compressor based on a pressure switch. As long as the building blocks meet your needs, it's great.

However, I found it to be a significant challenge to implement anything that wasn't already part of the easyC repertoire. You have to resort to "knowing syntax" in order to define arrays or static variables, for example; but what you do that way is not understood by the rest of the easyC environment.