considered harmful

adj. [very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968
Communications of the ACM, Goto Statement Considered Harmful, fired the
first salvo in the structured programming wars (text at
http://www.acm.org/classics). As it turns out, the title under which the
letter appeared was actually supplied by CACM's editor, Niklaus Wirth.
Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful
that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a
position against a coding practice. (Years afterwards, a contrary view was
uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably, Goto considered harmful
considered harmful. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both
serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form X considered Y.
The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realization
that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a
persistent minor in-joke (the considered silly found at various places in
this lexicon is related).
