considered harmful
considered harmful adj. 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. 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. 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).
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