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)



Class Home




First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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