Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
[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