Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
[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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
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.
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck