Ask HN: State of PLC Programming

2 points by jokinko 6 years ago | 1 comment

Hello. Experienced PLC programmers, how do you feel like working with current PLC programming (ST,CodeSys) languages when there's a whole world of great programming languages like C#, Kotlin, Lisp. I feel like I'm trapped in the old way of programming when doing PLC and there's no way to escape. How do you feel about it? Are there some tools or ways which would make my work easier?

antstrangler 6 years ago |

ST is a somewhat crude language and it turns out ugly most of the time. However it's simple and gets the job done. That being said the implementation varies between vendors.

Beckhoff allows non standard stuff to hide the worst offenders like the 10-ANDs in an IF condition with something that looks like a function call.

If you can use FBD (and your vendor implementation is good) you can make overviews useful for debugging while implementing the details in ST.

In the end changing what language I write code would not save much time between getting the specification to the customer pushing the start button in my case.