Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
--Andrew Hunt
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
[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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
...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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin