Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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.
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
[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 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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis