Considered harmful

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". Considered harmful was popularized among computer scientists by Edsger Dijkstra's letter "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", 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". Regarding this new title, Donald Knuth quipped that "Dr. Goto cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated." 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. The May 1987 CACM printed further replies, both for and against, under the title GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?''. Dijkstra's own response to this controversy was titled On a Somewhat Disappointing Correspondence. == Snowclones ==

• • (Full proposal text was included in post-meeting distribution; see summary.) • • 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.) • • • • • See C shell. • • • • • • • See Human-centered design. • • • • • • • • • See C (programming language) and musl, which the author maintains. • • • • See Filename extension. • See Mixins and React (software). • See Electron (software framework). • See Tensor (machine learning). • See Exception handling syntax. == References ==