My guess is one of the project's goals it to reach programming. If that is the case, Python is a great language. If the goal was simply to make fighting robots

My guess is one of the project's goals it to reach programming. If that is the case, Python is a great language. If the goal was simply to make fighting robots, something more agnostic would be cool. That said, the system enforces a 300ms response time per robot, so compiled languages would have a big advantage.