Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
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