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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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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--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
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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 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
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter