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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'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
...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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--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
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.
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
[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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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