[BotnEyedJoe]

We were previously a C++ team, and went into this season cautiously looking at Python, figuring the upside potential made it worth some investigation, but that we would do a dual-development side-by-side with C++ in case we hit a show-stopping problem later on.

Well, a couple of weeks or so into build season, Python was such a smooth and complete experience [other than that camera thing which is well covered in a separate thread and was really a WPILib problem anyway], we decided to drop the C++ line and go Python. And we never looked back...

When competition season came, I had nightmares the night before our first regional, thinking that the show-stopper I was worried about was about to happen; something along the lines of: we get the robot onto the field and it can't communicate with the field or something esoteric that causes us to miss matches. Ha! We got out on the field the first time, and two other robots had that problem, not us; and we never had any problem with the field in two regionals. The Python experience was just 100% reliable out on the field, judging by our experience.

We would echo many of the comments in the OP: students pick it up much more easily, making and fixing code is just *so much faster*!! Yeah, typos and little defects don't bite you until you run the code they are in, but we used a bench-top cRIO to smoke-test the code before using the code in the real robot, and that mitigated nearly all those issues. And even when we goofed on the real robot, it was so fast and easy to fix, that people were seldom waiting for the software to get working again.

I could go on and on, but generally we very much recognize that Python was a big positive for us this season, and we are not going back to C++ as long as Python is around.