Programs for the new FRC platform

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by frcchile

Can you give us an opinion about which one is the best software for you

Our team decided to program in C++ for multiple reasons.

All the returning students on the software team have become very familiar with C over the past few years and we already have a good curriculum developed to teach the new students C in the first semester. All of the software mentors have ~10 years of experience with C / C++ and we all use it at work so we are extremely familiar with designing and writing C / C++ programs.

We also have a large software team (3 mentors and 10 students) and we typically break up into small teams to simultaneously work on different features. In some cases, this requires different teams to modify the same files and merge them together later. This is trivial with a text based language and SVN, but is impossible with labview's binary file format.

The last reason is that we feel C / C++ is a more useful language for the students to learn than labview. C is an industry standard with compilers for hundreds of chips while labview is a propriety language supported by a single company. We'd rather not teach the students a language that locks them into a single supplier. Labview is typically only used for data acquisition and industrial automation while the uses for C / C++ are endless. Anyone going into a software development career will need to learn C / C++ or a similar language in college. We're giving the students a huge head start by teaching them the concepts and the language before they get there.