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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