Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Fall 2024 -- CSC 2700 Section 01
1720 Business Education North Wing, 6:00 PM - 7:50 PM



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I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.
--Robert C. Martin
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter