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)



Class Home




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
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.
--Larry Wall
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Along every step of our journey through life, our mind is being programmed. If we are not programming it ourselves, someone else is doing it to us.
--Joseph Rain
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.
--Steven S. Skiena
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--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
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.
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw