Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly.
--Joe Armstrong
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
[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
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 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