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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
The personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.
--Audrey Watters
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic