Any news on Studio 5000 Designer V34 yet?

theColonel26 · Aug 28, 2021

pturmel said:
I am solidly against OOP elements in Logix. The whole point of ladder logic is to not need a G** D*** CS degree to maintain it.

You don't need a CS degree just need to use google and read... My 2 year Comp Sci degree was mostly worthless. I learned modern programming theory from google.

Further machines are becoming more complex all the time, programming methodology has to change with it. And the whole point of object-oriented programming is to keep things organized and abstracted so that you can more quickly understand the main program flow.

May I introduce you to these guys with the signs, you will get along.

cardosocea · Aug 28, 2021

pturmel said:
I am solidly against OOP elements in Logix. The whole point of ladder logic is to not need a G** D*** CS degree to maintain it.

On-line edits to AOIs would be a wonderful feature. Even better would be on-line edits to UDTs and IO modules.

It's this kind of thinking that will make Rockwell obsolete.

They already don't do much (look at their catalogue and they develop most of their IO and PLCs and rebrand everything else).

Their programming interface is still in the stone age and their commercial practices are dubious at getting people to know their platform. As soon as the old timers kick the bucket and newer people come in, Rockwell will be in serious trouble as they won't be worth what they charge to people with a different mindset. Personally, I think it will be fun to watch. I do feel sorry for the guys working there, but the ones I know will be retired.

theColonel26 · Aug 28, 2021

cardosocea said:
It's this kind of thinking that will make Rockwell obsolete.

They already don't do much (look at their catalogue and they develop most of their IO and PLCs and rebrand everything else).

Their programming interface is still in the stone age and their commercial practices are dubious at getting people to know their platform. As soon as the old timers kick the bucket and newer people come in, Rockwell will be in serious trouble as they won't be worth what they charge to people with a different mindset. Personally, I think it will be fun to watch. I do feel sorry for the guys working there, but the ones I know will be retired.

Oh I am in love with this comment, and agree 100%

alive15 · Aug 28, 2021

Dang, I was hoping to make a career out of AB PLCs too lol. You guys think Rockwell will fail that badly?

mk42 · Aug 29, 2021

cardosocea said:
Their programming interface is still in the stone age

The one good thing that it has going for it is that the LAD is all text, and is easy to enter, and easy to mass edit/import logic via a simple tool like excel. Lets a programmer feel like they can do some pretty fancy things pretty easily.

GRANTED that most of that Excel logic generator stuff wouldn't be necessary if AOI's were useful as a function concept, but hey .....

cardosocea · Aug 29, 2021

mk42 said:
The one good thing that it has going for it is that the LAD is all text, and is easy to enter, and easy to mass edit/import logic via a simple tool like excel. Lets a programmer feel like they can do some pretty fancy things pretty easily.

GRANTED that most of that Excel logic generator stuff wouldn't be necessary if AOI's were useful as a function concept, but hey .....

I learned to program PLCs by writing ladder in paper, translating to Instruction List and typing away in a terminal with a 16x2 LCD. I'd imagine most PLCs have that kind of functionality... Siemens did up to TIA Portal, for example.

The disjointed way of making code re-use is something that will byte them hard and is part of why I think they're in the stone age and will be hit harder.

alive15 said:
Dang, I was hoping to make a career out of AB PLCs too lol. You guys think Rockwell will fail that badly?

An AB PLC installed today, unless they kill off the available IO for an application will remain in operation for 10 to 20 and possibly longer than that. There's big money in knowing outdated tech (and having software for it).

This being said, I can imagine that the company will be absorbed when the **** hits the fan. I can see Emerson being interested... Schneider since they seem to buy everything to try and become relevant...

But by then, some of the innovative players like Beckhoff may have taken a lot of their market.

pturmel · Aug 29, 2021

theColonel26 said:
You don't need a CS degree just need to use google and read... My 2 year Comp Sci degree was mostly worthless. I learned modern programming theory from google.

cardosocea said:
It's this kind of thinking that will make Rockwell obsolete.

They already don't do much (look at their catalogue and they develop most of their IO and PLCs and rebrand everything else).

Their programming interface is still in the stone age and their commercial practices are dubious at getting people to know their platform. As soon as the old timers kick the bucket and newer people come in, Rockwell will be in serious trouble as they won't be worth what they charge to people with a different mindset. Personally, I think it will be fun to watch. I do feel sorry for the guys working there, but the ones I know will be retired.

Meh.

Geeky programmers have been saying all of the above for decades. And young bucks have been deploying OOP all over the place for decades, too. ****es off the people on the factory floor when their maintenance techs and electricians can't fix that stuff when it breaks.

OOP is supposed to make a solution easier to understand and maintain. And it does, if the maintainer is well versed in both general programming paradigms and OOP concepts as well.

For everyone else, it's gobbledygook.

Telling a recently laid-off journalist to "learn to code" is a cruel joke, because a mind capable of handling more than trivial programs is a rather rare thing. Yeah, a lot of people without technical degrees pick up the concepts on their own. That is not evidence that the ability to do so is widespread.

Ladder logic is rather easy for just about anyone to follow. So too with function block programs. Well-documented AOIs in ladder or FBD fit this paradigm well.

Don't hold your breath anticipating OOP's takeover of the front lines of industrial machine control.

Rockwell's business practices and ridiculous software pricing may doom them, indeed. But it won't be for lack of OOP in their controller products.

FWIW, I've been that young buck, deploying code that could not be maintained by techs and electricians. I have 40 years of paid conventional and OOP programming under my belt. I make my industrial customers happier with my 30 years experience with ladder logic.

Phrog30 · Aug 29, 2021

pturmel said:
Rockwell's business practices and ridiculous software pricing may doom them, indeed. But it won't be for lack of OOP in their controller products.

FWIW, I've been that young buck, deploying code that could not be maintained by techs and electricians. I have 40 years of paid conventional and OOP programming under my belt. I make my industrial customers happier with my 30 years experience with ladder logic.

Thanks Phil, very well put. Some of these guys on this site just don't get it.

Aardwizz · Aug 30, 2021

cardosocea said:
It's this kind of thinking that will make Rockwell obsolete.

Their programming interface is still in the stone age and their commercial practices are dubious at getting people to know their platform.

People have been hating on AB/Rockwell since this forum first began ("6200 sucks; use ICOM")
People have been predicting Rockwell's demise about as long. Here's a blog post from 20+ years ago:
http://www.jimpinto.com/commentary/rockwell.html#TROUBLE

I'm not saying it can't happen. As Forrest Gump says, "Business happens". But 20 years from now, I expect that people will still be posting here the same stuff.

cardosocea · Aug 30, 2021

pturmel said:
Telling a recently laid-off journalist to "learn to code" is a cruel joke, because a mind capable of handling more than trivial programs is a rather rare thing. Yeah, a lot of people without technical degrees pick up the concepts on their own. That is not evidence that the ability to do so is widespread.

Funnily enough, there's a guy in the Embedded world that prefers to teach programming to English graduates than computer scientists because programming is nothing more, nothing less than expressing commands clearly. This puts writers at an advantage when it comes to write clear code.

pturmel said:
Ladder logic is rather easy for just about anyone to follow. So too with function block programs. Well-documented AOIs in ladder or FBD fit this paradigm well.

FWIW, I've been that young buck, deploying code that could not be maintained by techs and electricians. I have 40 years of paid conventional and OOP programming under my belt. I make my industrial customers happier with my 30 years experience with ladder logic.

Ladder logic is easy to follow in simple applications throw in calculations or recipe management as some brands start to do in order to reduce complexity and reliance on Windows and Ladder is definitely not simple to understand. Yes, it's easier to understand for some boolean conditions, but that's it. As machines get more complex, so will the programming language to represent what the machine has to do. Of course, the underpinnings and display can still be in ladder, but the building blocks won't be.

What's the age difference between you and who you consider your customers?

Aardwizz said:
People have been hating on AB/Rockwell since this forum first began ("6200 sucks; use ICOM")
People have been predicting Rockwell's demise about as long. Here's a blog post from 20+ years ago:
http://www.jimpinto.com/commentary/rockwell.html#TROUBLE

I'm not saying it can't happen. As Forrest Gump says, "Business happens". But 20 years from now, I expect that people will still be posting here the same stuff.

20 years is nothing in automation... I have PLCs older than that still in operation.

drbitboy · Aug 30, 2021

cardosocea said:
Originally Posted by pturmel
Ladder logic is rather easy for just about anyone to follow. So too with function block programs. Well-documented AOIs in ladder or FBD fit this paradigm well.

FWIW, I've been that young buck, deploying code that could not be maintained by techs and electricians. I have 40 years of paid conventional and OOP programming under my belt. I make my industrial customers happier with my 30 years experience with ladder logic.

...Ladder logic is easy to follow in simple applications throw in calculations or recipe management as some brands start to do in order to reduce complexity and reliance on Windows and Ladder is definitely not simple to understand. ...

Generally, calculations will not be understood by techs and electricians, so that does not make the case for or against any language. Also, calculations are not where the techs and electricians get involved in the first place, so again it doesn't matter.

@pturmel's post makes a point that should be obvious: whatever their specific skills, all must be business-people first. Business choices will be situation-dependent: sometimes OO will be the best choice, sometimes ladder; when someone promotes one shiny-shiny solution for all situations I call nonsense by its name.

Choosing OO over ladder for calculations or recipe management may save money in project development, but any such benefit at the front end is amortized over the life of the project, which life is measured in decades as noted earlier. So that benefit, in a business context, is minimal to non-existent.

Using ladder for the boolean logic sections, which techs and electricians can understand, can and will reduce downtime throughout the life of a project; that is a hard, operational, and ongoing benefit. Using a procedural language increases downtime by leaving the techs and electricians twiddling their thumbs during an outage while they wait for the high priest (programmer) to arrive*.

* Yes, well-made HMI screens can and should be created to aid diagnosis, but 1) that will only work for situations anticipated by the HMI designers, and 2) that should always be done and is independent of the language. One unanticipated outage without ladder, where none of the HMI screens help, and they are back to twiddling thumbs.

Caveat: I don't have a dog in this fight, but even with decades writing code in procedural and OO languages, I can see the business benefits of ladder when it fits.

cardosocea · Aug 30, 2021

drbitboy said:
Generally, calculations will not be understood by techs and electricians, so that does not make the case for or against any language. Also, calculations are not where the techs and electricians get involved in the first place, so again it doesn't matter.

@pturmel's post makes a point that should be obvious: whatever their specific skills, all must be business-people first. Business choices will be situation-dependent: sometimes OO will be the best choice, sometimes ladder; when someone promotes one shiny-shiny solution for all situations I call nonsense by its name.

Choosing OO over ladder for calculations or recipe management may save money in project development, but any such benefit at the front end is amortized over the life of the project, which life is measured in decades as noted earlier. So that benefit, in a business context, is minimal to non-existent.

Using ladder for the boolean logic sections, which techs and electricians can understand, can and will reduce downtime throughout the life of a project; that is a hard, operational, and ongoing benefit. Using a procedural language increases downtime by leaving the techs and electricians twiddling their thumbs during an outage while they wait for the high priest (programmer) to arrive*.

* Yes, well-made HMI screens can and should be created to aid diagnosis, but 1) that will only work for situations anticipated by the HMI designers, and 2) that should always be done and is independent of the language. One unanticipated outage without ladder, where none of the HMI screens help, and they are back to twiddling thumbs.

Caveat: I don't have a dog in this fight, but even with decades writing code in procedural and OO languages, I can see the business benefits of ladder when it fits.

Both can be used? Like you say, if the maintenance techinicians can't understand the maths around it, why have it in Ladder in the first place? Also, how many robots are programmed in Ladder? Why are they more and more prevalent if there's no Ladder to them?
I find this dicussion always interesting because in some industries ladder is barely existent and they deal well without it. Oil drilling offshore in new installations (15 years and younger) for example is done with a mix of Instruction List, Siemens FBD and Java. No Ladder there.

Land rigs, particularly from a certain company are all RT Java based.

So it is indeed possible to have something without Ladder. People do need to get used to it. The Java application in particular was simply amazing to watch and debug and from the commissioning and troubleshooting point of view light years ahead of any PLC I've used. No licensing, no IDE, just open a web browser, point at the processor and access the internal data structures to see what was missing.

drbitboy · Aug 30, 2021

cardosocea said:
a mix of Instruction List, Siemens FBD and Java. No Ladder there.

For boolean logic, the difference btw FBD and ladder is, to my eye, minimal as far as being used by maint staff for diagnosis.

cardosocea said:
if the maintenance techinicians can't understand the maths around it, why have it in Ladder in the first place?

if there is any boolean logic that could be viewed by maint staff for diagnosis, then ladder may - may - make sense.

Counter examples are interesting but not universally applicable.

cardosocea said:
So it is indeed possible to have something without Ladder.

No one is saying that. However, there are expressed opinions saying that everything is better without ladder, and that makes no sense.

I think the following may be true: "The only things wrong with language [insert language name here] are its proponents."

pturmel · Aug 30, 2021

cardosocea said:
What's the age difference between you and who you consider your customers?

I'm 54.

Probably 90% of my industrial customers (both the ones who initiate purchase orders and the electricians/techs in their orgs) are younger than me.

The older customers are the ones sometimes skeptical, as I do deploy non-ladder solutions where appropriate. Mostly Ignition, nowadays.

{ For the pedants who notice the age vs. paid programming statement, I will pre-emptively note that I learned to program in middle school, starting with 8080 machine language. By high school, I was bartering computer help with many of my teachers. Then paid programming and related internships right out of high school. }

drbitboy · Aug 30, 2021

pturmel said:
I learned to program in middle school, starting with 8080 machine language.

LOL. Zilog z80 (8080+, IIRC) and 8085 early experiences here.

Any news on Studio 5000 Designer V34 yet?

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