[davidthefat]

Here is my two cents: do not get caught up in the whole "which" language debate in the first place. Just pick one. The language you use will not affect performance of the robot (unless you are doing some memory intensive calculations and need to optimize). What is important is the way you think and come up with a solution. Regardless of the language, the solution is the most important thing here. Different languages will not hinder your ability to come up with that solution; chances are, you won't be using features specific to one language. For example, pointers; every object other than primitives in Java are essentially pointers. Don't be immature and say "oh, but I want to use pointers, so I must use C++". No. You also probably will not need inline assembly either. Java just makes memory management easier too. If your java program has a memory leak, you are doing something very wrong...