[MAldridge]

I would say to steer clear of C if you have never used it before. It took me several years to get into objective C (apple forever!), and it is not a forgiving language to beginners. If you can get a hold of someone who knows pure C, then yeah, learn it, it is used for a lot of stuff, but in truth you can write 'real world' programs in anything you want!

That being said, I don't like java. I don't like it mainly because in the normal computer world (not sure about FPGA's) it is interpreted. I also don't like it because I think it is way more complex than is necessary for using FRC (yes, I know it is quite simple usage, but still, this is not what Java was really set up for, and so it has some quirks).

I personally would say use LabView. I have used it for 4 years of FRC plus a years worth of side projects. I find that it is great for the setting of FRC because it is so integrated with the template files. It is a great implementation of the WPIlib, and I find imaq to be hard to beat. I also use LabVIEW for real world programs, because I can get my program built faster in it than in another language. Plus, if you are absolutely bent on it, you can call traditional code from within LabVIEW. An important note though, LabVIEW is unlike any traditional language you may have dealt with. In that, where text based languages execute code linearly, LabVIEW executes whenever the required inputs to a function are available. It takes some getting used to, but I find it to be a much better way of doing signal processing.