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



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A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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.
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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