Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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