Starting programming...

[kenavt]

Originally Posted by apalrd

I learned VB a long time ago. Thats why I didn't do any software stuff for a few years afterwards.

Then I learned C++ basics, like functions, variables, and cout/cin.

Then I joined my middle school's FLL team my 8th grade year. I quickly learned Mindstorms and actually hit the maximum potential of the language (that is not hard to do in Mindstorms). It was fun, and prepared me to think like a programmer more then I did previously. Freshman year on the Killer Bees, I learned LabVIEW, and although my code actually looked like spaghetti and had many issues, and was poorly organized, it worked. I wrote the crab steering code on our 09 robot, and it was later integrated into the rest of the code written by Jim (and probably re-written, I don't actually know what the final code looked like).

This year I made a much larger effort to organize my code, I wrote some software in the off-season to simulate arms and crab steering, and was the software lead (well, the only programmer).

Being a fairly high-level programmer, I was more interested in the algorithms, logic, and design of the code then the implementation. I am still good at writing it, but spend some time before writing it on organization and partitioning modules. I actually never used C for anything useful until 2009 OCCRA, on the VEX processor in Microchip C. And I learned a lot more then I want to know about pointers on that little VEX processor.

It depends on if you prefer higher level or lower level programming. If you already think like a programmer and focus on the logic, not the implementation, then LabVIEW is probably for you. If you prefer writing syntax and debugging lines of code, then C++ is probably best (better start with C-like code that dosen't use pointers or classes first, then work up to classes/namespaces and pointers).

To be honest, I don't really know what is high level vs. low level programming. And, what I'd like to do, is be able to do CLI languages like C++ or Java in my free time, and then be able to switch over to LabVIEW for robotics. I think I'm going to just go with learning C++ out of a book while experimenting with LabVIEW at the robotics team meetings, and then move on to different languages.

I'd recommend against learning C++ as your first language. You should start with Java as you will encounter much fewer headaches and debugging code is a lot easier.

The thing is that I already know some C++ - std::cin and cout and if-then statements, and I feel I already have a grasp of the language. Then, maybe I'll move onto C and Java.