[Bongle]

None of my team's students had experience in either labview or C/C++, but we had me (full-time C/C++ programmer) and a few other mentors who had dabbled in C++. With this in mind, we decided that:
1) We were bound to hit roadblocks in either environment. Think bizarre compile errors, or "why is it doing THAT?!" kind of events.
2) People with lots of experience in a given environment tend to know how to get around roadblocks in that environment
3) Thus, choosing the environment that we had background in would be the most prudent choice.

Another way to look at it is that labview probably has a higher "top speed of development", but accelerating our team to that rate would take long, because not only would the students be learning, but so would the mentors. With C/C++, we can hit the ground running, programming wise. Our plan is to compete this year with C/C++, then re-do the robot's program in labview so that next year we're ready to do it all in LabView. See attached image for a pictorial version of this paragraph.