[OWilliamson]

Our team has always programmed with Labview in the past. In our opinion it is very straight forward and people have been able to pick it up very quickly. I know that some people have complained about being somewhat limited when it comes to certain applications, but we have been able to do everything that we have wanted to with it. I have also been able to find a lot of support for it, and there are quite a few tutorials floating around online which can help a ton.

We also used to have horrible deploying time until this year. In years past we only used the Classmate as the programming laptop, and as a result deploying would take an eternity. This year we finally got a new laptop and our deploys have been very fast, with the complete code deploying in less than a minute. I think the laptop had an i3 processor with 16 GB of RAM and 2 SSD's. That may be a little overkill, but that is just what we decided to go with. I know that it isn't always possible to get a brand new laptop, but you will most likely see a speed increase no matter what language you decide to go with.

There is nothing wrong with trying out other programming languages, but if you do that I would make sure that your programmers know that language very well by the time the season rolls around. It is not fun to have to learn a new language in season as well as getting competition worthy code.