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!

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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 personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.
--Audrey Watters
But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
--Andrew Hunt
...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
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler