The usual phrasing is "X considered harmful," which is a passive sentence and doesn't actually say who considers it harmful. Originally it was used from a posit

The usual phrasing is "X considered harmful," which is a passive sentence and doesn't actually say who considers it harmful. Originally it was used from a position of authority ; E. W. Dijkstra made about forty years of very important contributions to computer science, most of them more significant than: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T... . Today it's complaining that an academic organization charges for access to papers ( http://se9book.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/acm-considered-harmful/ http://se9book.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/acm-considered-harmf... ) or warning about a base feature in a family of languages ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/arrays-considered-somewhat-harmful.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/array... ). One of these is an opinion from an unsatisfied customer ("I don't like the way ACM charges for papers and requires copyright assignment"), and the other is a pretty important point about a language from one of its designers ("Arrays don't belong in public APIs in .NET languages").