Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
...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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl