Competitive/Collaborative Programming Class

ICPC Computer Programming Contest Prep

Problem Solving in Computer Science

Spring 2025 -- CSC 2700 Section 01
1212 Patrick Taylor, 6:30 PM - 8:20 PM



Class Home




When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a list of religious issues:
■ Programming language
■ Indentation style
■ Placing of braces
■ Choice of IDE
■ Commenting style
■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs
■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary delivery ■ Programming utilities
■ Naming conventions
■ Use of gotos
■ Use of global variables
■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day
--Steve McConnell
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison