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)



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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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--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
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
...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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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