Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

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
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
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.
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
[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 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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.
--Steven S. Skiena