There are a lot of threads on ChiefDelphi on this topic (that usually degrade into a "what is industry" debate...),
At a high level, LabVIEW is developed for engineers to be able to easily manage dataflow through their devices, and is made by NI (that also makes the roboRIO), so it technically has the most support.
C++ offers a potential slight performance gain (because you can optimize your memory management a little better).
Java - some developers like it because it is a text language that with managed memory.
Some teams choose the language they're going to use based on availability of mentors familiar with the language. Others pick based on a concept of what the students might use after graduation (spoiler alert, LabVIEW should be on this list for anyone considering going into engineering).
I have often encouraged students to learn two programming languages that are vastly different:
- C++ and Java a similar enough to not count as different here (granted one is managed and passes everything by reference and the other doesn't, but syntactically very similar)
- Python
- LabVIEW
- maybe JavaScript (not an option for the roboRIO, but can be good to have familiarity with if consider CompSci or Computer Engineering)
