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



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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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.
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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 really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly.
--Joe Armstrong
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso