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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I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
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
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