Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
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
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
[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
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous