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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Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
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
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard