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




That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff