[apalrd]

Having programmed in a multitude of languages (including LabVIEW, C, Matlab, Simulink, and Perl) I could use either C++ or LabVIEW to accomplish the task with about the same amount of effort on my end. I've always thought that C++ and Java are the same for what we are doing (all of the higher-level features of Java don't help us), so it's personal preference between the two.

That said, LabVIEW provides a much nicer debugging interface, and the real-time front panel is just awesome. It's super easy to change stuff and look at graphs and data without doing anything in code.

C++ and Java are both textual, C++ is procedural or object oriented, Java is object oriented. LabVIEW is a data-flow language, so it represents code as the flow of data and operations happening to the data, which is quite easy to understand.