Best way to start?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Ginto8

...when designing robot logic, a more procedural method makes more sense in most cases than a dataflow approach,...

Procedural programming obviously makes more sense to you. It does make a lot of sense to anyone who learned to program using a procedural language like C or Java or even BASIC. But dataflow programming makes at least as much sense to people who know it. I'd even say that a dataflow approach makes more sense than a more procedural method to people with a background in PLC programming or in circuit design.

but insofar as I have seen, LV is simply not as capable with procedural approaches.

You merely haven't seen far enough yet. Give it time.

LabVIEW provides two trivially easy ways to do strict procedural programming (error chaining and Sequence Structure frames), with Case and loop structures able to act just like their procedural counterparts. A moderately experienced programmer can implement a procedural algorithm directly in LabVIEW.

It takes a bit more experience to get to the point of being able to build simple frameworks to combine the best qualities of both the dataflow and the procedure-oriented viewpoints. I think a year of FRC robot programming might be just about enough time to get that experience.