Rookie team seeking some programming advice

[shuhao]

We're a rookie team this year and we were hoping to seek some advice about the coding for FRC.

Here's our situation:

We want to use Java to program our robot as it's the most familiar to all of the programmers on the team. However, I just learned that it's Java ME, which means some of the stuff we want to use (such as certain linear algebra libraries for AI) may not be compatible. I've taken a look at C/C++, but I'm not sure if it's doable under Linux. I only saw mentions saying that Java can be developed under Netbean under Linux (Anyway to change that to eclipse by any chance?). Is Java the best choice here?

Since our programming team (which includes myself as the lead programmer) has little experiences on "bare metal", how should we gain more experience? Is it beneficial to start something such as a mock interface and some code (maybe some algorithm such as object tracking instead actual control)?

Thanks for any input.