Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
[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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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.
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth