[Pault]

I personally prefer Java over LabVIEW. I have been on 2 teams that recently switched between the two (one team from Java to LabVIEW, one team from LabVIEW to Java), and the students on both overwhelmingly prefered Java.

In general, there are more teams that use LabVIEW. But from what I have seen, New England has a ton of Java teams, especially among the top teams that you would usually go to for assistance. There is also support at a lot of local events from the crew at WPI that codes the FRC Java/C++ libraries.

The biggest downside is that the initial hurdle of teaching students the basics of Java is a lot tougher than teaching LabVIEW. But once they know the syntax, it is fairly easy to write FRC code (if you are concerned about difficulty, just use RobotBuilder).

I would heavily caution against using LabVIEW if your team has a lot of students with prior coding experience. I don't think I have ever seen someone enjoy going from a text-based object-oriented language to LabVIEW.

Also, C++ is very similar to Java, especially in the context of FRC. Most of what I said above applies to it aswell.