Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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.
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--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
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven