[kuyan]

Our team is/was in a similar position. Ultimate Ascent was our first season, and we were a LabView shop. I'm not on the programming team, but as I understand it, we stayed away from Java/C++/et al. and close to LabView because LabView seemed simpler and the other languages seemed more daunting and a bit lower-level than we needed.

There's already a load of better advice above this post, so I'll keep this short. Whichever language you decide to use, you need to have a mentor with experience in that area. There are forums, IRC channels, etc. that you can go to if you need help, but it's not the same as having someone with specific experience on-site. Especially with the lower-level and more complex languages like C++.

In short, you really need someone on the team who's been bitten by everything your programming language can bite you with.