Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
[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
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
...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
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
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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.
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso