Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
...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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
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