Considered Harmful

Considered harmful is a part of a phrasal template used in the titles of at least 65 critical essays in computer science and related disciplines. It was popularized by Edsger Dijkstra's letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful, 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. 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 Go To 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.

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".

Some variants with replacement adjectives (considered silly, etc.) have been noted in hacker jargon. Many variants deal with computer-related issues, such as:

Web design consultant Eric A. Meyer focused upon the letter itself: "Considered Harmful Essays Considered Harmful".

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