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




Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.
--Robert Nystrom
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
The personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.
--Audrey Watters
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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.
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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
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.
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler