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




Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
--Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
One knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
--Brian Kernighan