[RyanN]

Here's my opinion:

I love LabVIEW. I learned it by mentoring FRC and have used it at NASA for data acquisition. It also made some college lab and project stuff a bit easier to accomplish. It's a great language to learn for robotics and if you get the right job, you will definitely be using it. Big companies use it besides NASA.

C++ is my second favorite. C and C++ are very powerful languages that are used from small, low powered, embedded applications (robotics), to very high-powered supercomputers. It's probably the most difficult language to learn, but also the most versatile language to choose from.

Java hasn't been useful in my experience in electrical and computer engineering. I learned Java for my database class, but haven't had a need to use it since then. If you're into web development or Android development, then it'll be useful. Embedded... yea... it'll run on microprocessors, but not as common to see as C++.

Python is the most significant upcoming language. Since I got to college in 2008, it seems its use has exploded. I dabble in Python more than any other language right now. It was shoved down my throat in the past few years of college and I use it everyday now. It's not officially supported by FIRST, but I bet it will very soon. It's also pretty easy to learn for the first time (harder to learn when you're taught C++ because you keep trying to do things the hard way).

MATLAB and Simulink are also very useful collegiate and lab based software solutions... but NI and Mathworks aren't the best of friends (competing products). I used a ton of Simulink in graduate school and I know NASA used it quite a bit for modeling and data processing.