Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Spring 2023 -- CSC 2700 Section 01 (1216 Patrick Taylor, 6:30 PM - 8:20 PM)



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Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
[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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven