Python or C?

For the software side of our plotbot, we needed to decide which programming language to use. My first instinct was to use C, for a few reasons:

1. It's probably the programming language that I'm most familiar with.
2. I want to try out the ARM DS-5 development environment for the Raspberry Pi from Hitex (www.hitex.co.uk/RPi/DS-5 Workspace Export.zip) - this makes the project much more embedded-y
3. If we can program to the "bare metal" (i.e. not bother with an operating system), the application should have incredible performance.

On the other hand, Elliot pointed out that he's learning Python, and he wants to do some of the programming. Other factors in favour of Python are:

1. The development environment. It's really easy to prototype, test and debug in Python
2. Lots of libraries mean that we can put together lots of complex functionality really quickly
3. (not exactly Python-specific, but relevant here) We won't be programming to the bare metal, so we get all of the rich features that the OS provides (a full TCP/IP stack, for example).

The performance of C vs Python probably isn't likely to be relevant here, as my suspicion is that the plotbot hardware will be much slower than a Python app.

So Python it is then.