Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Spring 2020 -- CSC 2700 Section 01 (Patrick Taylor 1218, 6:30 PM - 8:20 PM)

Class over for the semester!

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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 most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare