"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. 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".

Considered harmful was popularized among computer scientists 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 "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

  • William Wulf and Mary Shaw (February 1973). . ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 8 (2): 28–34. doi:. S2CID .
  • 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). . USENIX. 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.)
  • John McCarthy (December 1989). . Communications of the ACM. 32 (12): 1389–1390. doi:.
  • C. Ponder; B. Bush (1992). . ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 27 (6): 76–79. doi:. S2CID .
  • 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:.
  • CA Kent; JC Mogul (January 1995). "Fragmentation Considered Harmful". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 25: 75–87. doi:. S2CID .
  • Tom Christiansen (October 1996). . See C shell.
  • Peter Miller (1998). . AUUGN. 19 (1): 14–25. Archived from on March 30, 2015.
  • Jonathan Amsterdam (February 2002). . Software Development Magazine.
  • Ian Hickson (September 2002). .
  • Eric A. Meyer (December 2002). .
  • 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). Vol. 2. pp. 1312–1321 vol.2. CiteSeerX . doi:. ISBN 978-0-7803-7752-3. S2CID .
  • Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino (October 2003). . IETF Internet-Draft.
  • Donald A. Norman (July 2005). "Human-centered design considered harmful". Interactions. 12 (4): 14–19. doi:. S2CID . See Human-centered design.
  • Knight, James. . fuhm.net. from the original on November 8, 2023. Batchelder, Ned (September 29, 2007). . nedbatchelder.com. from the original on November 8, 2023. Hettinger, Raymond (May 26, 2011). . Deep Thoughts. from the original on December 27, 2023.
  • A Mishra; V Shrivastava; S Banerjee; W Arbaugh (June 2006). "Partially Overlapped Channels Not Considered Harmful". ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review. 34: 63–74. CiteSeerX . doi:.
  • Kapser, Cory; Godfrey, Michael W. (October 2006). "Cloning Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful. 2006 13th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. pp. 19–28. doi:.
  • Howard Chu (February 2008). . LDAP Mailing List.
  • Alexander Sotirov; Marc Stevens; Jacob Appelbaum; Arjen Lenstra; David Molnar; Dag Arne Osvik; Benne de Weger (December 2008). .
  • Andy Crabtree; Tom Rodden; Peter Tolmie; Graham Button (April 2009). . Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 879–888. doi:. ISBN 9781605582467. S2CID .{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Rich Felker (a.k.a. 'dalias') (July 2013). . See C (programming language) and musl, which the author maintains.
  • Eric S. Raymond (March 7, 2014). . Groff Mailing List. from the original on September 18, 2019.
  • Paul Ceruzzi (June 2015). . National Air and Space Museum.
  • Joanna Rutkowska (October 2015). (PDF).
  • Alex North-Keys (January 2016). . talisman.org. See Filename extension.
  • Dan Abramov (July 13, 2016). . Archived from on May 25, 2025. See Mixins and React (software).
  • Drew DeVault (November 2016). . See Electron (software framework).
  • Alexander Rush (January 2019). . Harvard NLP. See Tensor (machine learning).
  • Irit Katriel (November 2024). . GitHub. See Exception handling syntax.