I am thinking about creating a team for the 2014-2015 season. I am homeschooled, and therefore will be buying my own parts. I love programming, and hope to do something for the autonomous period. I have a bit of experience with TouchDevelop, a programming language geared towards touch devices, and SmallBasic, a simplified though fully functional version of Basic. I think TouchDevelop is also similar to Basic, though I’m not sure. Which programming software should I buy? I’m leaning towards ROBOT C, since I have no experience with drag 'n drop programming.
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Rather than buying anything, you want to try PROS?
It’s free, works well, and we’ve had a lot of success with it. The guys from Purdue are here on the forums and are fixing any bugs that are reported. I like all the features that being Eclipse based gets us, from auto-format to auto-complete. I’m sure my programmers could come up with a dozen other things I’m forgetting, but basically we can’t recommend it enough. PROS has been great.
Our teammates are using ConVEX, and they seem to be think it’s even better. I’m not exactly sure why. You could take a look into it.
That sounds great, since I’m kinda freaking out about the costs. How do I find and install PROS?
Easy for Windows. Installs everything you need. Dunno about Mac or Linux.
ROBOTC has a 30 day trial, EasyC has a 7 day trial. When you have your cortex, try them both out. If you have some experience with programming you can also try PROS (which is basically eclipse with a couple of VEX specific plugins and a library you link against ) or ConVEX (another library but supplied as source code), they are both free.
All four options will do the job, they are “means to an end”.
Despite being the author of ConVEX I always recommend ROBOTC for beginner/intermediate level programmers, the ROBOTC debugger is the killer feature.
Whatever you choose, we can help with any questions you have.