Java vs Labview

[mathking]

LabView is actually pretty widely used outside of FIRST. It is actually older than Java. As has been said, it is used primarily for control, automation and data acquisition applications. If you have students who have done FLL, making the jump to an FRC robot programmed in Java will not be difficult. That and the ease with which autonomous routines can be coded are two strong reasons for using LabView.

That said, we have been using Java since we switched from LabView in 2010. The reason is pretty much John said, the kids use Java in AP and IB Computer Science, so we have more Java capable programmers than LabView. As a computer science teacher (who has programmed and taught in C++ and Java) I find that Java's event driven programming paradigm makes understanding robot code easy when compared to using C++.

For me the biggest question to ask is do I have most capability (student and mentor) to support one language choice over the others. That trumps the relatively smaller differences in the capabilities of the languages. All three of the FRC programming language choices will allow you to do what you want with a robot.