Last week at the MIT January term course Hacking a Technical Interview, after a class period finished a student asked me the question:

I know many different programming languages. How do I choose which one to use during my interview?

Why choose just one?

Don’t get me wrong—I advocate learning and writing code in many programming languages. But when it comes time for programming interview preparation, I feel it’s important to choose one language to focus your prep on and get to know it very well.

While many interviewers don’t mind you writing pseudocode during the early planning step of answering a question, others I’ve come across really want you to show you can write compilable code without an IDE. Not only that, but that you appear very comfortable writing real code.

Read more at Coding for Interviews.