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Comment by bvisness | Hacker News Reader

The only officially supported languages for the competition are C++, Java, and LabVIEW. When those are your educational options...you stick with Java.

(We've now switched to Lua, integrated with the official C++, but it's a lot more work behind the scenes.)

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What's the hardware/OS stack you have for the autonomous part? Can you go wild and use unsupported software as long as it fits in the official hardware?

We can use whatever software we want as long as we use the specified hardware (the NI roboRIO), FIRST's latest firmware, and comply with the match system and safety systems that enable and disable the bot at different times. Many teams have been using a community Python alternative called RobotPy for a long time despite it not being officially supported and FIRST had no problem with it.

The largest constraint on this (in the context of the FIRST competition) is that community matters at least as much as technology.

If you're using Java (or C++ or LabVIEW, to a lesser extent), you at least have a hope of posting to a forum and going "Hey, we think our robot should be doing X and it's doing Y, here's our code, any insights?"

If you use <bespoke language X> and your own custom bindings, you're on your own.

Why not Python? I thought that was the popular language for learning these days. My son gets quite a bit of Python in school.

Python is slated to become a choice for the 2024 season: https://wpilib.org/blog/bringing-python-to-frc

If it is that flexible, can you have a C++ program that runs a python interpreter as a module?

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