Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
[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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
...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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler