Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Fall 2025 -- CSC 2700 Section 01
1245 Patrick Taylor Hall, 6:00 PM - 7:50 PM



Class Home




The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know.
--Benjamin H Bratton
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
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 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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
...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
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay