Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
...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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
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
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 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
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong.
--Ken Thompson
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha