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




First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
...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
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Along every step of our journey through life, our mind is being programmed. If we are not programming it ourselves, someone else is doing it to us.
--Joseph Rain
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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian