Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
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
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
...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
[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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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