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




Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
...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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.
--Larry Wall
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson