About
This site is made and managed by the FRC robotics team Slice 8738 (along with help of a generous friend). Here, we plan to help you get started with programming the robots that you will make for the competitions, in 2 languages supported: Java and C++. Commonly, Java is used in the building of these robots as it is easier to learn and format compared to C++, but technically C++ is faster due to it being a compiled language. In these guides, we will assume you are starting from ground zero, and with no technical background. These guides are meant for FRC only, and may not be as efficient in other areas.
Why do we promote use of Java and C++ compared to other languages supported by FRC, such as LabView and Python? While these other languages are certianly useful and much easier to learn, they dont have nearly as much flexibility as Java or C++. The main reason majority of the teams use Java, for instance is due to it's simplicity and cross-platform usage. Java is a special language, which compiles itself but is also a interpreted like python, with the Java Virtual Machine, or the JVM. This means that once compiled, it can run on many different operating systems and you only need the JVM to run it. This is true for python as well, but as said before, Java allows for more flexibility. Java also has much wider support and has great base documentation of it's own, meaning that anyone can learn fairly simply. That also means much more libraries for us to use that have been made by other competitors for us to use, making our life much easier. Java is also an Object Oriented Programming langauge or an OOP, which helps keep things tidy and resuable. C++ is a lower level language than Java, meaning it has much more direct access to the hardware, allowing for more control. While all these are possible in python, it is not recommened as python is more of a scripting language.
We will also learn how to interact with APIs or Application Programming Interface, which allows programs to interact with sites to get data. The response will be in JSON which we will also learn.
words from the creators
We truely hope that this will help you. This is a sub-project presented by Slice and a generous friend.
Reason we made this site is so that we can truely help people learn programming and arent as intimidated by it, as starting out can be hard, especially if you have no one that you can ask for help with. This site has hopefully enough to help you get started on programming with either Java or C++. We personally recommend Java if you're starting out, as it is simple enough to learn and is extremely useful in the real world as well. We wish you luck in this, and happy coding!