Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
One knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
--Brian Kernighan
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
[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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
...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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous