Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.
--Robert C. Martin
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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
...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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
[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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay