Considered harmful

Considered harmful is a part of a phrasal template used in the titles of at least 65 critical essays in computer science and related disciplines. It was popularized 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 Go To Statement Considered Harmful. Regarding this new title, Donald Knuth quipped that "Dr. Goto cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated."