Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Fall 2025 -- CSC 2700 Section 01
1245 Patrick Taylor Hall, 6:00 PM - 7:50 PM



Class Home




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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare