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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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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.
--Robert C. Martin
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
--Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
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
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison