Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--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.
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
...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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
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