Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
...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 not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
[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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay