I am trying to deside what one to use!! Help!!
One of our robots runs EasyC, the other runs ROBOTC. I personally prefer ROBOTC because it is faster and more like a real-world application.
Normally I stay neutral on this topic, however, CMU has and continues to put major effort into ROBOTC development. Some of the deficiencies from last year have been addressed (ie. pointers and recursion) and the ability to simulate and debug is far ahead of EasyC. I am not seeing the support from Intelitek that I would like, for example, still no official support for the VEX speaker, and very little indication if any major improvements are being made.
So ROBOTC is my recommendation.
I primarily use EasyC. I’ve spent several hours learning to use RobotC, and would strongly recommend it if simply due to it’s superior debugging capability and lack of memory writing errors alone.
If you have never programmed before, EasyC is a good introductory platform, but really can’t teach you too many useful practices past effective program flow. It encourages all variety of bad programming habits.
I also have experience with both. (I used EasyC last year and am using RobotC this year.) If ease of use is the only thing you care about, go with EasyC. RobotC is much faster, more powerful, and has more real-world applications. (You actually learn C.) Therefore, I recommend RobotC.
haha so what i got out of this is USE ROBOTC!!!
Yes, I’m trying to make the transition from EasyC to RobotC… I can tell that I’m going to be able to do tons more, once I pass the learning curve. EasyC does exactly what it says, it’s easy but it also limits you on your ability to do really advanced stuff (unless it’s on a block).
I hope I’m not offending anyone here, but it’s like comparing iOS to Android. iOS gives you the same overall functionality as Android, but you can’t tweak iOS as much as you can with Android.
Hope that helps.
Not really saying anything people haven’t said but I what i find useful about easyc is how quickly you can get driving so a lot of the time someone on my team will throw together some code in easyc for testing and such. We will then go back through and recode it in robotc with a more final robot.
For a noob team either one could be the right decision based off what you are trying to get from the programming.
If you are a small team with no one interested in learning C then easyc will get you what you want but if you want to use vex as a stepping stone to something greater robotc is probably the better option.
In my humble opinion it is well worth the effort. for many reasons. my top5
- multitasking
- good support from the company
- faster compiles and downloads
- better debugging
- not so important in Vex but multi platform support
Best wishes -
Cheers Kb
RobotC is great in terms of capability and real-world applications, but personally I encourage EasyC in new teams or junior teams. A lot of new members don’t want to spend a lot of time programming - building seems to be where it’s at for the younger ones. EasyC takes 5 minutes to teach and 2 minutes to write a program, and doesn’t require searching for missing semi-colons.
So IMO It really depends on how much time you want to dedicate to your programming, and how new the team members using it are.
In my competition days, I used EasyC and was happy with it. I have been teaching RobotC at work to the FTC and VEX teams and find it easier for students to learn and it seems to work alot better than EasyC. If this is an industry that you want to go into in your future, learn RobotC.