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)



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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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
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
...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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay