Improving the experience of programmers and the effectiveness of code

[spartango]

If we want programmers to grow across the FIRST robotics competition, we need a great deal more code sharing between teams and individual developers...this doesnt just mean example code--"oh look, here's how to write ur teleop mode" doesnt help anyone as programming is never fully understood until you actually do it for yourself.
Instead, I think we should push for more abstraction and framework code, developed by experienced developers(metor or student), and the sharing with and teaching rookie developers, across team lines.
I say abstraction can be the vehicle for two reasons. First, abstraction makes programming a great deal easier to understand(the rationale for high-level languages), and also, as rookies learn those frameworks, they will begin to explore the possibilites of adding to them..

These are really high minded goals, but I believe they are within the capabilities of FRC teams. As an example, my team (192; Palo Alto, CA) has built a friendly framework for this years competition(and future years) in Java, and Open-sourced it to allow other teams to utilize it. It is available at http://code.google.com/p/grtframework

We offer as much support as is possible to users of the framework, and release it not after competition, but before it, just as teams are allowed to try out java. Our hope is that instead of fighting the language change, people can be helped into it and reap the benefits.