Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
...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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
[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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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.
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.