Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
[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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
...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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra