[Alan Anderson]

The NetworkTables communication framework is supported in all three languages. It can provide features similar to LabVIEW's interactive front panels.

I believe LabVIEW is hands down the easiest environment for inexperienced programmers to use. I typically see people having real difficulty with it only when they are already familiar with text-based languages. There's obviously a lot of support for it from National Instruments, the provider of the cRIO. This year, the built-in robot simulator might make it even better.

Java comes in second in my estimation, and I have a strong impression that it's the favorite of the people who maintain the WPIlib code. There's a very nice tool to generate robot code automatically for either Java or C++, and I think that tool is written in Java.