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




Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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 isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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 is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin 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