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




What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Along every step of our journey through life, our mind is being programmed. If we are not programming it ourselves, someone else is doing it to us.
--Joseph Rain
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
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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
--Theodore H. White
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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.
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
But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
--Andrew Hunt
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay