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!

The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
...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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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 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
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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous