Curiosity on why most teams choose LabView

[PhilBot]

Considering that the most usefull thing that you could do in auto last year was "drive straight for 5 seconds" and that anything beyond that was gravy, points to the fact that the teams that "had no auto" were probably dealing with more challenging issues than which language to use.

The fact that their robots moved at all in teleop is a good indication that whatever language they used was sufficient for them.

I was a died-in-the-wool C++ programmer untill I learned LabVIEW for Lunacy back in 2008. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I made the switch for two reasons...

1) The language was being used in FTC and FRC, so a programmer I trained in one, was usefull in the other.

2) It seemed that LabVIEW would be more usefull to a wider range of Engineers/Scientists, than say C++ which would be best for a computer science student.

If you're programming an air traffic control simulator, you're not going to use labview, but how many engineers do that sort of programming?

I'm dissapointed that last years, (and maybe this years) FRC game didn't provide more reward for great auto modes, but I didn't see the teams that wanted to use labVIEW to do cool programming being limited by their choice.

Case in point... our FTC robot has a good range of auto modes that we'll be running in Atlanta later this year (for the second time).

I also really like the graphical debugging capabilities of LabVIEW, and I'm not sure I'd like to go back to text based debugging.

Phil.