Rookie team seeking some programming advice

[Ether]

Originally Posted by flameout

The development environment set up for teams can hardly be described as "bare metal" (there's a lot of libraries and virtually no low-level programming with this control system)

Ditto that.

@ shuhao: And if you were wanting to program "bare metal", Java would seem not to be the best choice anyway, since it's intended to be abstracted from the machine by the VM.

If you haven't yet experienced the joys of programming something that reacts to the outside world in realtime through sensors and actuators, the paradigm shift associated with that kind of programming may be one of your hurdles. If you're looking for a way to get a head start, that might be a fruitful area for study.