Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Spring 2022 -- CSC 2700 Section 01 (1216 Patrick Taylor, 6:30 PM - 8:20 PM)



Class Home




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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown