Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin 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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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 kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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.
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown