Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

[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
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
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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.
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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