Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong.
--Ken Thompson
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
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
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--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
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
...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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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.
--Alan Perlis
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
--Frederick P. Brooks Jr.