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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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.
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
...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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.