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
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
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
--Theodore H. White
[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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif