Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Think twice, code once.
--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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.
--Steven S. Skiena
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
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
The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly.
--Joe Armstrong
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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 most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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 in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
...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