Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian
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
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth