Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin 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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
...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
[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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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