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




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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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 language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine