Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
...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
[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
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
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard