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




When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly.
--Joe Armstrong
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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.
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
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune