Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
...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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler