Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin 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 most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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 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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
[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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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