[FRC Blog] FIRST WPILib Documentation expands to include more languages plus FIRST Game Jam

FIRST General Forum
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https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/blog/2021-wpi-languages-game-jam

We wanted to let you know about some exciting updates from WPI that will hopefully make a lot of teams lives a little easier moving forward!

A few months ago, WPI’s Austin Shalit and Brad Miller started doing some localization work on the WPILib Documentation in order for the content to be more easily translated into different languages. This effort has quickly expanded into a project involving a number of people across the globe!

The work began with a group of several enthusiastic teams, volunteers, and mentors in the FIRST community who volunteered to translate more than 300 programming documents from English to French. That’s roughly 172,000 words, but who’s counting?

The team recently wrapped up the project in just under two months. You can read more about it and all the awesome people who made it happen here.

Currently there are several other volunteers working on translating these documents to Spanish, which they have already completed by more than 50%.

The folks at WPI are also working with several other groups to get started on translating the documents into more languages. Some of the ones you can expect to see on the website in the future include Chinese, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Turkish.

Accessing translations:

To access the translations currently available, visit Docs.WPILib.org. The English translation will appear by default.

At the bottom left corner click the black box that says “Read the Docs.”

Accessing languages FIRST Robotics Competition

Under languages, you can select English, Spanish, or French.

Make sure to continue to check back to see as more languages are added!

If you have any suggestions or questions about the project, please reach out to Brad Miller at Brad@bradhouse.com.

WPI is also hosting the FIRST Game Jam! This is an exciting opportunity to collaborate with others and share your FIRST experience beyond the FIRST community! There are lots of opportunities to learn about how to create virtual games being provided prior to the start of the competition, so all levels of participants are welcome. Check out all the details here and get in the game!

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You know you are a programmer when you assume languages = programming languages.

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Joke’s on you! I’m no programmer (like, I stop at VLOOKUP in spreadsheets) and my mind went to the same place.

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I really thought it was going to be an announcement that Kotlin was an officially supported language.

I’ll just keep dreaming.

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Kotlin would fix a lot of my complaints with Java on the library development side (reified generics, less verbose syntax, first-class functional programming, and inline classes for zero-overhead unit conversions). The main thing preventing adoption over Java is the fact very few of us know Kotlin. Our developer base is mostly proficient in C++, so new features are usually implemented in C++ first, then ported to Java.

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from memes import tears
while LANG_PYTHON == “Unsupported”
  print(“Cries in Python”)
  tears.waterworks(True)

Jokes aside, this is cool and I’m glad more languages are being supported… even if more languages aren’t being supported.

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If that’s something the team is looking for help with, I’d be interesting in helping get there!

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Kotlin is kinda already supported by supporting Java. The only Kotlin exclusive thing would likely be a couple of overloads. It’s not really something that we’d push for considering the Kotlin user base is 4 teams the past year.

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Not including teams that didn’t get a chance to play, right?

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Is that based on the same data that shows that we run LabVIEW by chance?

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Correct. And it’s based on the 2020 Usage Data. But past numbers haven’t been great either. Teams do have to manually declare it.

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I would only call Kotlin unsupported in the sense of support. It will work on your robot just fine.

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