The increasing amount of pre-canned code

[Racer26]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

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I said I'd get to the point eventually, so here it goes. In the real world, you're more likely to faced with a problem like we have now in FIRST. You have a new challenge and you have some good code on the bookshelf. You have to determine how to make the best use of the library code and then fill in the gaps. But just keep in mind that if you use code that you don't understand, you're playing with fire - and don't expect the insurance company to bail you out if you burn down your house playing with fire.

This is exactly the point I was trying to get to and not quite sure how to get there.

I remember in 2009, my team reached the Waterloo Regional, and had to reflash our cRIO and update workbench, and so forth. From the version of WPILib we'd been using in testing, to the version that got flashed there, the Library had changed. They changed the timer code from returning something in seconds to returning in microseconds, or vice versa, I can't remember exactly. This caused our steering code to stop working as it used a timer, and the numbers were now different by a factor of 1 million. I tracked it down fairly quickly, but making changes like that to precanned code could cause problems that less experienced programmers might not track down as quickly.

Admittedly, we should have updated before ship, but I hadn't thought of it, and I certainly wasn't expecting a change that changed the outward functionality of the black-box that is WPILib.

I'm not really griping about the new system. I actually rather like it. The object-oriented approach to coding the robot is so much more logical. I just sort of feel like, particularly for the C++ last year that WPILib was poorly documented, and somewhat unfinished at time of release. Perhaps it could have been handled better, or perhaps they could have documented changes like the above change better in some sort of changelog. Maybe they did and I just didn't see it.