Considered harmful

Short description: Phrase used in titles of critical texts

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"Achievements considered harmful?" presentation at the 2010 Game Developers Conference

Considered harmful is a part of a phrasal template "something considered harmful". As of 2009[update], this format been used in the titles of at least 65 critical essays in computer science and related disciplines.[1] Its use in this context originated with a 1968 letter by Edsger Dijkstra published as "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".

## History

Considered harmful was already a journalistic cliché used in headlines, well before the Dijkstra article, as in, for example, the headline over a letter published in 1949 in The New York Times: "Rent Control Controversy / Enacting Now of Hasty Legislation Considered Harmful".[2]

Considered harmful was popularized among computer scientists by Edsger Dijkstra's letter "Go To Statement Considered Harmful",[3][4] published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM (CACM), in which he criticized the excessive use of the goto statement in programming languages of the day and advocated structured programming instead.[5] The original title of the letter, as submitted to CACM, was "A Case Against the Goto Statement", but CACM editor Niklaus Wirth changed the title to "Goto Statement Considered Harmful".[6] Regarding this new title, Donald Knuth quipped that "Dr. Goto cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated."[7]

Frank Rubin published a criticism of Dijkstra's letter in the March 1987 CACM where it appeared under the title 'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful.[8] The May 1987 CACM printed further replies, both for and against, under the title '"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?.[9] Dijkstra's own response to this controversy was titled On a Somewhat Disappointing Correspondence.[10]

## Snowclones

This article may contain indiscriminate, excessive, or irrelevant examples. Please improve the article by adding more descriptive text and removing less pertinent examples. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for further suggestions. (February 2026)

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* William Wulf and Mary Shaw (February 1973). "Global Variable Considered Harmful". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 8 (2): 28–34. doi:10.1145/953353.953355.
* Bruce A. Martin (November 15–19, 1976). "Letter O Considered Harmful". proposal considered by X3J3 members. Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY: X3J3: ANSI Fortran Standards Committee. (Full proposal text was included in post-meeting distribution; see summary.)
* Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan (1983). "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful". USENIX. http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/. Retrieved January 25, 2020.
* This article is the namesake of a Cat-v.org Random Contrarian Insurgent Organization, which maintains a directory of "considered harmful" articles and hosts some Plan 9-related software. (Rob Pike was a main figure in the creation of Plan 9 and wrote extensively on bad designs found in UNIX.)[11]
* John McCarthy (December 1989). "Networks Considered Harmful for Electronic Mail". Communications of the ACM 32 (12): 1389–1390. doi:10.1145/76380.316015. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/harmful.html.
* C. Ponder; B. Bush (1992). "Polymorphism considered harmful". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 27 (6): 76–79. doi:10.1145/130981.130991.
* Eliot Lear; Erik Fair; Dave Crocker; Thomas Kessler (July 1994). RFC 1627: Network 10 Considered Harmful (Some Practices Shouldn't be Codified) (Technical report). IETF. doi:10.17487/rfc1627.
* CA Kent; JC Mogul (January 1995). "Fragmentation Considered Harmful". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 25: 75–87. doi:10.1145/205447.205456.
* Tom Christiansen (October 1996). "Csh Programming Considered Harmful". http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/csh. Retrieved January 25, 2020. See C shell.
* Peter Miller (1998). "Recursive Make Considered Harmful". AUUGN 19 (1): 14–25. Archived from the original on 2015-03-30. https://web.archive.org/web/20150330111905/http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/.
* Jonathan Amsterdam (February 2002). "Java's new Considered Harmful". Software Development Magazine. http://www.ddj.com/java/184405016.
* Ian Hickson (September 2002). "Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful". http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml.
* Eric A. Meyer (December 2002). ""Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful". http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html.
* J Yoon; M Liu; B Noble (April 2003). "Random waypoint considered harmful". IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428). 2. pp. 1312–1321 vol.2. doi:10.1109/INFCOM.2003.1208967. ISBN 978-0-7803-7752-3.
* Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino (October 2003). IPv4-Mapped Addresses on the Wire Considered Harmful. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-itojun-v6ops-v4mapped-harmful-02.
* Donald A. Norman (July 2005). "Human-centered design considered harmful". Interactions 12 (4): 14–19. doi:10.1145/1070960.1070976. See Human-centered design.
* Knight, James. "Python's Super Considered Harmful". https://fuhm.net/super-harmful/.
* Batchelder, Ned (29 September 2007). "Python's super (considered harmful)" (in en). https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200709/pythons_super_considered_harmful.html.
* Hettinger, Raymond (26 May 2011). "Python's super() considered super!" (in en). https://rhettinger.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/super-considered-super/.
* A Mishra; V Shrivastava; S Banerjee; W Arbaugh (June 2006). "Partially Overlapped Channels Not Considered Harmful". ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review 34: 63–74. doi:10.1145/1140103.1140286.
* Kapser, Cory; Godfrey, Michael W. (October 2006). ""Cloning Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful". 2006 13th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. pp. 19–28. doi:10.1109/WCRE.2006.1.
* Howard Chu (February 2008). "GnuTLS Considered Harmful". http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-devel/200802/msg00072.html.
* "MD5 considered harmful today - Creating a rogue CA certificate". December 2008. http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/.
* Andy Crabtree; Tom Rodden; Peter Tolmie; Graham Button (April 2009). "Ethnography considered harmful". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 879–888. doi:10.1145/1518701.1518835. ISBN 9781605582467. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1518701.1518835.
* Rich Felker (a.k.a. 'dalias') (July 2013). "NULL considered harmful". https://ewontfix.com/11/. Retrieved January 25, 2020. See C (programming language) and musl, which the author maintains.
* Eric S. Raymond (March 7, 2014). "mdoc considered harmful". https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2014-03/msg00086.html. Retrieved October 4, 2020.
* Paul Ceruzzi (June 2015). "Star Trek Considered Harmful". https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/star-trek-considered-harmful.
* Joanna Rutkowska (October 2015). "Intel x86 considered harmful". https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf.
* Alex North-Keys (January 2016). "Commandname Extensions Considered Harmful". https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/documents/commandname-extensions-considered-harmful/. See Filename extension.
* Dan Abramov (July 13, 2016). "Mixins Considered Harmful". https://legacy.reactjs.org/blog/2016/07/13/mixins-considered-harmful.html. See Mixins and React.
* Drew DeVault (November 2016). "Electron considered Harmful". https://drewdevault.com/2016/11/24/Electron-considered-harmful.html. See Electron (software framework).
* Alexander Rush (January 2019). "Tensor Considered Harmful". http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/NamedTensor. See Tensor (machine learning).
* Irit Katriel (November 2024). "Return in Finally Considered Harmful". https://github.com/iritkatriel/finally/blob/main/README.md. See Exception handling syntax.

## References

1. ↑ "Miscellaneous - Considered Harmful". Archived from the original on 2009-05-03. https://web.archive.org/web/20090503144621/http://jeff.over.bz/?04_Miscellaneous/03_Considered_Harmful. Retrieved August 17, 2009.
2. ↑ Mark Liberman (April 8, 2008). "Language Log: Considered harmful". http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004675.html. Retrieved August 17, 2009.
3. ↑ Edsger Dijkstra (March 1968). "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". Communications of the ACM 11 (3): 147–148. doi:10.1145/362929.362947. https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf. "The unbridled use of the go to statement has as an immediate consequence that it becomes terribly hard to find a meaningful set of coordinates in which to describe the process progress. ... The go to statement as it stands is just too primitive, it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one's program.".
4. ↑ Dijkstra, Edsger W.. EWD-215. E.W. Dijkstra Archive. Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF. (transcription)
5. ↑ David R. Tribble (February 2005). "Goto Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective". http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html.
6. ↑ Dijkstra, Edsger W.. What led to "Notes on Structured Programming" (EWD-1308). E.W. Dijkstra Archive. Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF. (transcription) (June, 2001)
7. ↑ Kanada, Yasumasa (2005). "Events and Sightings: An obituary of Eiichi Goto". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 27 (3): 92. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2005.37.
8. ↑ Frank Rubin (March 1987). ""GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful". Communications of the ACM 30 (3): 195–196. doi:10.1145/214748.315722. Archived from the original on March 20, 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20090320002214/http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/ParaMount/papers/rubin87goto.pdf.
9. ↑ Donald Moore; Chuck Musciano; Michael J. Liebhaber; Steven F. Lott; Lee Starr (May 1987). "" 'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful?" (PDF). Communications of the ACM 30 (5): 351–355. doi:10.1145/22899.315729. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/1987/5/10097-acm-forum/abstract.
10. ↑ Dijkstra, Edsger W.. On a Somewhat Disappointing Correspondence (EWD-1009). E.W. Dijkstra Archive. Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1009.PDF. (transcription) (May, 1987)
11. ↑ "Cat-v.org Random Contrarian Insurgent Organization". http://cat-v.org/.

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