Lego Mindstorms Programming - which language/IDE do you use/recommend? [closed]

Question

FYI, I came across this extremely helpful feature comparison chart of different languages which you can program the NXT in:

http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html

Another option is Microsoft Robotics Studio.

I think this is a good book about programming your Mindstorm NXT with the NXC (Not eXactly C) language.

"LEGO Mindstorms NXT Power Programming: Robotics in C" by John C. Hansen

With a small amount of tinkering you can probably get NXC working with whatever your favourite IDE already is.

We used NQC for programming Lego Mindstorms. We was to build a four-wheel robot to gather artificial rubbish(pieces of bead and paper) in a competition. After testing different programming and IDEs I concluded NQC was right to me.(because I knew C and NQC had many good tutorial materials). And the point is that you can modify your code easily with NQC. For example, at the competition, we should change our code in oder to cope with new challenges in our robot's environmetn( they changed MDF with carpet!)

by the way, We obtained a good result (third place) :)

MATLAB actually has a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Toolkit, if you're interested at all in using MATLAB. You can send commands via Bluetooth connection or create embedded controls that are downloaded to the robot. I've seen it discussed on some of the MathWorks blogs, and there are some demos posted on the MathWorks File Exchange (here's one).