Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell