Read the original article over at Gizmodo.

Hina Bhatia, winner of first-ever Code Diva title at TechGig Code Gladiator 2015, speaks about her winning strategy at hackathons and more

Q: Which language did you code at Code Gladiators? What was the reason for choosing this language over others?

A: I had used Java to answer all the questions in TechGig Code Gladiators. The primary reason for selecting Java was since it is the most popular and easy to learn programming language. Well, I work mostly on it so it’s quite natural for me to state this; however, I have my facts to support it!

Java is a platform independent, “code anywhere, run anywhere” kind of language which in itself is rich in features. The performance of Java programme is quite fast and it has strong features for everything that you can imagine to achieve in a programming language.

For beginners, there are lots of resources available for self-learning including numerous documented APIs. There are lots of third party libraries available that have been developed over the time and are available for consumption. Being open-source, much of the libraries are free to use.

Java is supported by a vast variety of free & open source tools (Servers – jBoss, GlassFish, Tomcat and IDE- NetBeans, Eclipse), that ease its development, deployment and support. Moreover, it is well supported by Oracle and thus they keep adding improvements with each new version.

Q: Out of all coding languages, which do you feel is the best for hackathons? Any specific reason for this?

A: No language is good or bad. It’s how you use it. If statistics are to be believed, JAVA, C, C++,C# are the most preferred languages amongst the coders. I think 90 per cent of coders would be comfortable with either of them as these are mature and commonly used language and suitable for enough technical projects. But restricting the use of a language will limit the talent and scope for innovation.

Q: As you code away in the hackathons, how do you decide the coding language you want to use?

A: One major factor for choosing a particular coding language is definitely your comfort level and experience with one over the other. But problem statement and functionalities does matter, as some languages support a particular feature, function or executional ease in some scenarios and some languages in other. So, going lean and agile is today’s “mantra” and everyone wants to reduce the time to market.

As a case in point, if I have to design the User Interface (UI) for a website or a tool, I would prefer HTML along with CSS and not Java (swing). Whereas if I have logical programme or execution issue to resolve, I would prefer Java or C. But again, these decisions are also governed by coders’ comfort with a particular language.

As told to Amrita Premrajan, TechGig.com

This article appeared originally over at Gizmodo.