Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Fall 2023 -- CSC 2700 Section 01 (2317 Patrick Taylor, 6:00 PM - 7:50 PM)



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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
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
...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
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