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8Feb/080

“Considered Harmful” Considered Harmful

Today I'm going to talk about the classic saying in Computer Science, "Considered Harmful".

Way back in the Stone Age of computer programming, a man named Edsger Dijkstra wrote a rant titled "A case against the go-to statement" for Communications of the ACM. He was apparently fed up with crappy programmers over-using goto (remember when you were 9, and you used to program in QBasic, and 75% of your code consisted of GOTO statements? Oh wait, that was me...) instead of procedural programming.

Now, the editor of this little publication (Niklaus Wirth) decided this title just wasn't volitol enough, so he renamed it "Go to statement considered harmful".

Ever since then, when some CS blogger/whatever wants to get some attention, they'll follow suit and say something is "Considered Harmful". It's just sort of a fun thing to say, like "Bill Gates Considered Harmful" or "Macintosh Over-Pricing Considered Harmful" or "World of Warcraft Considered Harmful". See, it's fun and it's catchy!

The great thing about using this is it immediately attracts people's attention, and evokes a visceral emotional reaction. Like, for you Microsoft programmers out there, when I said "Bill Gates Considered Harmful" you immediately had an emotional reaction. Admit it. Even just a little split second one. You Mac-heads out there, and World of Warcrack addicts, you had one too. Or maybe you agreed with me (even though I wasn't serious about any of them).

If I had just said "A case against the amount of control Bill Gates holds over Microsoft" it becomes much more objective, emotionless, scientific and rational. Not nearly as much fun as "BILL GATES CONSIDERED HARMFULL!!!" is it? Which one are you more likely to click on?

Ok, that's it! Thanks for reading. Now go forth and multiply the use of considered harmful!

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