Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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.
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
...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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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