Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong.
--Ken Thompson
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
...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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl