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




There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a list of religious issues:
■ Programming language
■ Indentation style
■ Placing of braces
■ Choice of IDE
■ Commenting style
■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs
■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary delivery ■ Programming utilities
■ Naming conventions
■ Use of gotos
■ Use of global variables
■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day
--Steve McConnell
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard