[Ginto8]

During my first year with our FRC team, we switched to Java, primarily because that was the language taught in our high school programming classes. I was primarily a C/C++ guy beforehand, but for our purposes in robotics, I found Java to be a very good choice. I didn't notice any performance problems (outside of trying to do image processing on the cRio, which is another issue entirely), cross-platform development was nice (I'm a Linux user), and not having to deal with explicit memory management made things less complicated.

I wholeheartedly recommend Java, but I think the most important factors in a decision like this should be prior student and mentor knowledge; if you don't have someone who knows the language already, programming a whole robot with it can be quite a difficult task.