Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
[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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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