Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
[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
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.
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
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