I’m looking for feedback from those of you that know PROS and the Python environments.
Can you tell me what I can only do in PROS? I’ve been very happy programming with the Robmesh tools. I’m being told that there is much more that I can do in PROS and I should make the switch. What am I missing out on?
So the obvious example is going to be Okapi.
But I will extend that further and say PROS C++ supports arbitrary libraries. If I want to do math for example, PROS lets me use Eigen while RobotMesh doesn’t support me importing Numpy. If I want more advanced gui features PROS lets me use LVGL, RobotMesh doesn’t support me importing pyqt or matplotlib. (This second one isn’t quite an apples to apples comparison but I did my best)
But empirically the only difference will be computational performance. Given robots rarely ever are bounded by the computation performance of their platform I doubt any overhead added by RobotMesh python has a significant impact. I could write any standard autonomous routine with a standard PID implementation in both systems and get identical competition performance, anyone who says otherwise is lying. As your desired behavior gets abnormally more complicated the harder it would be to implement in the robotmesh python environment without leaning on outside libraries but still 100% possible.
Second argument is about what computers can run it. PROS supports offline compile and downloading on all major platforms(windows, mac, linux), even Raspberry PIs. Robotmesh is limited to browser(with extension) or rmbuild (only on windows).
Which isn’t to say I don’t think RobotMesh Python is an amazing option, access to mimics, a bit easier to work with language are perfectly good reasons to use it.
With the 100’s of general languages and special languages I can’t tell if you are serious or not. Like I’d like to see Lua as a choice.
But I have some RoboCOBOL code to work on. 
A little weird that I’m being brigaded about one of my posts.
Tabor already highlighted the compatibility limitations of non-PROS options with 3rd party libraries.
At an API for robot functionality level, I’m not sure there’s much functional difference, with the one exception that I am aware of being the GPS sensor, which currently is not supported by RMS.
Personally, a large part of the benefit of using PROS is that I can use whatever editor I like to write my code. VEXCode and RMS studio just aren’t enough for me, and I am much more comfortable using a jetbrains IDE. PROS is the only programming option available for V5 that lets me write, build, and deploy my code from CLion without hacks or other workarounds. Really, the existence of the PROS CLI is the main value-add for me. This is personal preference of course. If students are starting out or new to programming, and they feel that RMS or VEXCode are sufficient editors for them, then that’s great. But once they move on to wanting to work with an industry-standard IDE or just plain one with more features and customizability, then PROS is really the only option available that allows them to do that.
Yea, ZeroBrane Studio is nice, since it does a number of different languages. It’s my favorite for Lua. PyCharm is pretty nice for Python type things. I use it when I mess with circuit Python or micro python.
But there will always be a fond spot for RobotC. But leaping into Vi,VIM, Emacs, Notepad was a little more than I wanted to bite off as a topic.