Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Fall 2022 -- CSC 2700 Section 01 (1216 Patrick Taylor, 6:00 PM - 7:50 PM)



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'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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.
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 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
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
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
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
...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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
[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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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