Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Fall 2020 -- CSC 2700 Section 01 (Patrick Taylor 1218, 6:00 PM - 7:50 PM)

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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
...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
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.
--Larry Wall
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander