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0 pointstimerol6y ago0 comments

This is basically a clickbait title at this point. After a now-famous CS letter by Dijkstra, "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"[1], the title format expanded dramatically. I'm personally a large fan of Meyer's '"Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful'[2] as a explanation and satire of the genre. Wikipedia also has a decent summary[3].

1: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p... 2: https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

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2 comments · 2 top-level

Stratoscope6y ago

This letter was also a classic example of how writers don't always choose titles, editors do.

Edsger Dijkstra's original title was "A Case Against the Goto Statement". Niklaus Wirth was editor of the Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) at the time and changed the title to the now infamous "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".

choward6y ago

Explaining "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful

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