Which language should we program in

[ItzWarty]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Third is the fact that, in the future, most of the world of software engineering will move to graphical methods. In my world, in automotive electronics, almost all of the software we 'write' is in graphical languages: Simulink, Stateflow, Statemate, Altia, etc. If we want to prepare these kids fo the future, we should pick our methods according to what they are likely to need someday.

As stated by the previous poster.

There will always be pros/cons between numerous languages, and how they work - that's why so many languages exist in the first place.

Graphical programming languages definitely do have potential, though. A perfect example would be in dynamically creating user interfaces, where numerous elements are nested. In a case like this, numerous "controls" are created, and appended to other larger "controls". This sort of flow is extremely well expressed in a visual programming language.

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To answer the original question:
Our Robot's source code was developed in Java.
The Operator Interface was developed in C# (which was influenced by C++/Java/Other Languages)
Last year we programmed the robot in LabVIEW.

Image processing was extremely to implement in C#, from the grounds up (directly manipulating the bitmap data). With C#'s ability to "pin" arrays to pointers, this code could execute at extremely fast speeds, and array element accessing did not have the overhead of bounds checking.