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)

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra