I don't think that is the intent of the article at all. I think the article is making a comment on building a single framework that can enable anyone to solve an arbitrary robotics problem. From the second paragraph, "The idea goes something like this: Programming robots is hard. And there are some people with really arcane skills and PhDs who are really expensive and seem to be required for some reason. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do robotics without them?"
There are host of companies, both extant and deceased, who attempted to do just that.
I don't think any ROS developer has ever made the claim that ROS makes building a robot "easy", "easier" yes, but "easy", certainly not. ROS is simply a collection of tools that people have built over the years to get their work done faster by not re-inventing the wheel. Many ROS packages have decades of real-world deployment behind them. Some ROS packages, like Nav2 and MoveIt, are incredibly helpful, other packages are difficult to use and poorly documented, just like in any open source ecosystem.
> Which in their quest to make robotics simple; made json a programming language
JSON, in ROS? I don't think that's how it works.
> massive ecosystem of abstracted complexity that breaks in undebuggable ways
If you have a solution for this I think you solved the problem of software engineering in general.
SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo Simulator
ROS is the open source software powering robots all over the globe. The project needs volunteers in every capacity, from core robotics software to visualization, data logging, and developer resources. Gazebo is our sibling library used to simulate robots prior to deploying code. Many of our repositories have "Good First Issue" tags for new contributors.
Source code and community resources for ROS, like Discord and Discourse, are all listed here:
I would love to see more FOSS projects on GitTip (https://www.gittip.com/). It would seem to me that regular small donations that can be budgeted would be more helpful than just scratching where and when it itches. Giving $1 a week versus $50 at once is so much more convenient. We as the FOSS community need to own up that writing and hosting software isn't free, and most of us as highly paid engineers are in a position to be charitable and help out. My resolution for this year is to give away 1% of my income to the FOSS community and related charities (EFF, Wikipedia, Ada Initiative, PSF, etc). I challenge everyone on HackerNews to do the same. Stop bitching and put your money where your mouth and let's go help make a better world.
This looks great. Most audio and image processing libraries are a pain and I always end up wrapping them in something like this. It is nice to see someone open source a well written wrapper.