18 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
18 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
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).
|