2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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considered harmful
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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adj. [very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968
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Communications of the ACM , Goto Statement Considered Harmful , fired the
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first salvo in the structured programming wars (text at
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http://www.acm.org/classics/ ). As it turns out , the title under which the
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letter appeared was actually supplied by CACM's editor, Niklaus Wirth.
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Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful
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that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a
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position against a coding practice. (Years afterwards, a contrary view was
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uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably, Goto considered harmful
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considered harmful' '. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both
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serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form X considered Y.
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The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realization
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that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a
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persistent minor in-joke (the considered silly found at various places in
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this lexicon is related).
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