I swear, I'm not trying to be the LabVIEW guy in the "Java or C++" thread, but I just wanted to comment on a few things.
I hope no one is paying money for either Wind River tools or LabVIEW tools. Teams are given as many copies as can be stuffed on the hard drives. Yes, in industry and in academia, people pay money for those products. That is how I make my house payments. Through the affiliates program, I know Bjarne Stroustrup and the A&M portion of the gcc distro guys and they live in houses too. I guess my point is that I don't see the connection between someone else paying money for something that you get for free and which tool helps your students learn to program a robot.
As for source code control, it is an important aspect of SW development. LV has plug-ins for perforce and a few other SCC tools, but not for all of the recent free ones I see mentioned on CD. It looks like
https://github.com/joerg/LabViewGitEnv explains how to accomplish a GIT integration, and I'm sure there are similar tutorials on other sites.
On the original topic? C++ is a very powerful language, but that power makes it complex and able to make mistakes that are very difficult to debug. The other languages aren no slouches in that regard, but C++ definitely takes the cake. For an introductory language, I'd also choose Java over C++. And if you want to learn a language that takes a different approach, you might give that other one a try.
Greg McKaskle