Considered Harmful

Like the oven cleaner, some things are very powerful and useful in their place, but you don't want to get any on you.

It originally came from 'GoTo Statement ConsideredHarmful', by EwDijkstra, in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148. You can read this classic paper online at http://www.acm.org/classics/oct95/ . The phrase has been much misused over the years.

According to the following anecdote, however, the phrase was not due to Dijkstra anyway:

In 1968 the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title 'X considered harmful' for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title 'A case against the goto statement', which in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a 'Letter to the Editor', and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was NiklausWirth. -- Dijkstra (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF, last paragraph.)

But this days there are many other things 'considered harmful': http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/

Count 'em: http://www.google.com/search?q=considered%20harmful (442,000 on Nov 26, 2001) (625,000 on May 4, 2002) ...but you should be doing: http://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=%22considered+harmful%22 (a mere 49,000 on Dec 3, 2002, about 51,500 on Mar 21, 2003, and now 71,000 on Jan 6, 2004) -- AnAspirant (247,000 on Feb 10, 2005) 1,620,000 20060517