Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Spring 2026 -- CSC 2700 Section 01
1218 Patrick Taylor Hall, 6:30 PM - 8:20 PM



Class Home




Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.
--Robert C. Martin
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
The personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.
--Audrey Watters
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.
--Steven S. Skiena
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know.
--Benjamin H Bratton
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.
--Robert Nystrom
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic