Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
...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
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
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
But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
--Andrew Hunt
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine