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




Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
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.
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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