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



Class Home




The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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