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!

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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 change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--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
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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.
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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 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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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