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“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful (2002)
- forinti 3y agoAll generalizations are bad.
- doodlesdev 3y agoOnly a sith deals in absolutes.
- prometheus76 3y agoBut that's an absolute truth claim stated by a Jedi... Fail for circularity.
- doodlesdev 3y agoYup lol. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35906258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35906258 https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/8067/if-only-the-sith-deal-in-absolutes-why-does-obi-wan-say-it-that-way https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/8067/if-only-the-s...
- Bilal_io 3y agoIncluding this one ^
- inanutshellus 3y ago"...except this one.", right? ;) (Certainly you anticipated this response.) Kidding aside, Fortini's tongue-in-cheek answer is the best one to such silliness. Certainly advice is neither absolute or contextless. I'd say that to suggest otherwise, especially in online discussion, is to act in bad faith. Certainly "considered" is already doing the job of pointing out it's an opinion, not natural law.
- IshKebab 3y ago> Certainly you anticipated this response Probably didn't anticipate so many people not getting the joke!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dgrin91 3y ago+1 to this. Nowadays when I see some "Considered harmful" post on HN its tends to be some dude on his personal blog talking about how in his 2 years of programming experience JS framework X is bad and instead you should use JS framework Y. Instant red flag and I'm likely to ignore.
- robear 3y agoI completely agree. "Considered Harmful" is one of my biggest pet peeves. It irrationally irritates me.
- musicale 3y agoIrrational irritation considered harmful.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoHarmful considerations considered harmful.
- MrVandemar 3y agoThat and prefixing something -- anything! -- "unpopular opinion".
- gessha 3y agoWhat’s better is “Mostly harmless”
- st_goliath 3y agoIf you love being irrationally irritated over uncreative headlines, here are a few more related contenders: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31836787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31836787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32821316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32821316
- IshKebab 3y agoYou should write a blog about this. You could call it "Examining falsehoods programmers believe about the unreasonable effectiveness of 'considered harmful' for fun and profit."
- cromulent 3y ago(2002)
- doodlesdev 3y agoWell noted, added it to the title.
- kwertyoowiyop 3y agoAt least “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of…” essays are no longer unreasonably effective.
- carabiner 3y agoHarm considered harmful.
- carabiner 3y agoMemes considered memeful.
- piwi 3y agoThis writeup is not backed by data and looks to be the author subjective opinion. I had a chance to read some "considered harmful" essay that where more convincing. In the end it boils down to the quality of the content, and the source is likely to be a better hint than the title.
- bee_rider 3y agoGoto is a perfectly good command in moderation. So, the first instance of “Considered Harmful” was harmful; the pithy title combined with the famous author has resulted in a disproportionate response (the total loss of this perfectly decent bit of syntax).
- Jtsummers 3y agoIt was only harmful to the people that read the title and not the actual letter. Dijkstra's take was much more moderate than most people seem to think it was, and the title wasn't even his.
- CoolGuySteve 3y agoYeah, the angst about goto is misplaced. Dijkstra was mostly talking about control flow jumping all over the program, ie spaghetti code. So it's funny when people rigidly adhere to the goto ban while simultaneously littering a bunch of tiny single use functions and classes all over their supposedly well-designed code.
- phantom784 3y ago"break" and "continue" are both effectively a "goto", and they're pretty commonly used.
- Jtsummers 3y agoThey are only equivalent to a very limited goto, not the unlimited sort that Dijkstra's letter was primarily about. A continue or break can be replaced with this: while (some_cond) { if (whatever) continue; if (whocares) break; } => while (some_cond) { next: if (whatever) goto next; if (whocares) goto after; } after: ... EDIT: added break into the above, forgot to earlier Note that it stays within the same scope or, in the case of a break, would just escape that scope. The sort of goto Dijsktra wrote about would let you do things like this: void foo() { while(some_cond) { next: // how did we get here again? ... } } void bar() { goto next; }
- karaterobot 3y ago> Typically, “considered harmful” essays gets written because someone has an axe to grind, and they feel like making that grinding process both public and dogmatic. Well and concisely put. I agree. Personally, what bothers me most about "X considered harmful" essays is the unspoken subject of the sentence. Who is it that considers X harmful? The title is structured to imply a broad consensus that is well beyond the point where anyone could possibly disagree with it. They want you to read it as "X considered harmful by all experts you should trust", but it's almost never that. The author is making up an authority, then telling you the authority is on their side.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoOr making up themselves to be the authority, without actually having earned that. At least Dijkstra had some earned cred before he published "Goto Considered Harmful".
- midoridensha 3y agoDjikstra never wrote anything titled "Goto Considered Harmful". His paper had an entirely different title, and some publisher made up that title and published it with that title, without asking Djikstra first.
- spacechild1 3y ago> some publisher That publisher happened to be Niklaus Wirth.
- layman51 3y agoWhat really tickles me about this “X Considered Harmful” title is that in its first famous appearance, it was an editor who rewrote the title of Dijkstra’s letter which was something like “A case against the Go To statement.” So in that original case, it was clear that the author of the letter was the person/authority in question. Now, to me, one isn’t supposed to use that passive voice title for one’s own writing unless you want it to be taken as a joke.
- dan-g 3y agoA list of “Considered Harmful” snow clones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
- superb-owl 3y agoAs someone who wrote a Considered Harmful essay which ended up on the front page [1], allow me to disagree. "X Considered Harmful" lets the reader know very precisely what it is they're about to read: a warning about a particular pattern or behavior that is common but tends to backfire. This goes for all meme-ified headlines ("X I love you but you're bringing me down", "Unreasonable Effectivenes of X", etc etc) It's important to bring nuance to a discussion rather than taking an extremist position, and I think that's the author's main gripe. But nuance also adds confusion and waters down the message. Sometimes it's better to stake a clear position at the outset, and then address the nuances. You can't just have balance; you have to balance balance with imbalance, balancedly [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33865030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33865030 [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/
- gavinhoward 3y agoFellow "Considered Harmful" author here. You made a separate point from my own comment, and your point is very true!
- kashyapc 3y agoI don't buy it. It is still absolutely distasteful to reach to the nearest cliché as a bait. This much-abused phrase falsely implies one man's personal take as a broad consensus. (Also see karatebot's excellent point[1] in this thread.) If your "clear position" truly has any legs, it will stand without having to resort to "harmful" clichés as a lure. [1] http's://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35906505
- thecodedmessage 3y agoYeah, but I’m simply not convinced this cliche is that bad.
- kashyapc 3y agoIt's not about being "not that bad". Unless you really know what you're talking about, it is simply "good internet manners" to not sleep-walk into such an overloaded cliché. Most readers on the internet are in a hurry. If you're putting something out with such a heavy-handed headline, you jolly well be right. The point is, we have to do our part in resisting the impulse to add to the pile-of-poo (which is most of the internet).
- tombert 3y agoI more or less agree; "Considered Harmful" has a bit of an authoritative tone, and I feel like it should be reserved after long studies and whatnot. I think if the essay were "Why I don't like <x> in language <y>", that would be a much more honest title.
- fsckboy 3y agothe paper was written at a time when public safety warnings were first mandated to be put on consumer products, stuff like "smoking considered harmful" on a pack of cigarettes. It was a clever and winking reference to the zeitgeist, just as hyperventilating about tone is today, something like "Wirth and Dijkstra were guilty of privilege escalating themselves to microaggress against FORTRAN programmers"
- acheron 3y agoI'll take "Considered Harmful" any day over "Falsehoods Programmers Believe".
- jollyllama 3y ago"The Truth about X"
- sixstringtheory 3y ago“Designed for humans”
- bin_bash 3y agoThe patronizing tone of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe" drives me crazy
- moron4hire 3y agoSo I take that to mean you could write an article titled, ""Falsehoods Programmers Believe" Articles Considered Harmful"?
- coffeebeqn 3y agoBoth are equally patronizing to me
- rocket_surgeron 3y agoConsidered harmful considered harmfuls considered harmful!
- gavinhoward 3y agoI authored a "Considered Harmful" essay against another "Considered Harmful" essay. [1] I knew about this essay when I wrote mine, and I still wrote mine. Why? Because the author of this essay is a hypocrite. He specifically disclaims his own essay from consideration: > For example, a piece titled “‘Considered Harmful’ Essays Considered Harmful” would very likely be a case of using the “considered harmful” format to draw attention for its own sake. We will ignore such essays in this commentary. But in so doing, he claims that using "Considered Harmful" to draw attention to the essay is fine. That's why I used it, and it worked. [2] He also says they are typically used by someone with an axe to grind. This is true. To combat this, I took a mellow tone in my essay, as compared to the inflammatory post I originally wrote on the same topic. [3] And yet, he transparently has an axe to grind against "Considered Harmful" essays because he does not allow nuance: > It would therefore seem obvious that the only intelligent course of action is to abandon their use entirely, and instead look to more constructive forms of essay writing in the support of debate positions. Basically, he says that use of "Considered Harmful" essays must be abandoned completely because they don't support their intended positions well. If so, why did he write one of his own? Is it parody or actually serious? I can't tell. But sometimes, "Considered Harmful" is the best way to express something. In that case, use it. But IMO, you should only do it after careful consideration, like what I did for my essay. Don't hamstring your writing by restricting your expression, and don't be a hypocrite. But do be careful and mellow. [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/static-linking-considered-harmful-considered-harmful/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/10/static-linking-considered-ha... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736238 [3]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/01/dynamic-linking-needs-to-die/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/01/dynamic-linking-needs-to-die...
- dontupvoteme 3y agoDijkstra wrote what he wrote and chose the words he did because he was Dutch. To some extent Anglos will never understand.
- martinjacobd 3y agoAs even the OOP states, Dijikstra didn't choose this title, though. Niklaus Wirth did. From a different reference: > Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published [...] "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 [....] 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 Niklaus Wirth. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF (In Dijkstra's own, very beautiful print hand!)
- gpjanik 3y agoPeople writing this kind of stuff are usually not Dijsktra anyway.
- at_a_remove 3y agoWe should probably do "Falsehoods Programmers Believe ..." one, called "Falsehoods People Believe About Falsehoods Programmers Believe." Ted in Marketing insists on a last name. That field is how the cold callers sort. Your boss' boss made promises, there's no time to cover all of these edge cases you keep talking about. Shipping says we don't serve India, anyway, so why are you making us go through this?
- fdhfdjkfhdkj 3y ago[dead]
- dang 3y agoRelated: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916 - June 2015 (79 comments) "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=290490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=290490 - Aug 2008 (4 comments)
- motohagiography 3y agoConsidering "Considered Harmful" Essays Harmful Considered Harmful. I actually think I could write a LISP out of this.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- andrewstuart 3y ago“Considered Harmful” is like "Open Letter". For some reason it is meant to bestow gravitas to the topic.
- akasakahakada 3y agoOK let me ask, is "take 60mins to understand but 1000x faster code" harmful?
- charlieyu1 3y agoI don't know, but Dijkstra's comment about BASIC sounds right to me
- Havoc 3y agoAlways struck me as weird phrasing. Very prevalent in hn subculture specifically.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoIt’s catchy because of its weirdness which made it into a 55 year old meme now.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoAssassination Politics by Jim Bell https://cryptome.org/ap.htm https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
- ggm 3y agoI dislike "your anti spam idea will not work because" lists more. They're an FAQ of reasons people say "won't work" when they just mostly mean "does not please me" or "invokes regulation and/or finance ie costs and I'm here for free" It's fine to be opposed to regulatory or cost models but saying won't work masks the real issue: don't want.
- tialaramex 3y agoI see, so, people explain why an anti-spam idea won't work and in fact it doesn't work, but you feel both the people who've explained why it won't work and the universe we live in where it didn't work are wrong.
- ggm 3y agoSome of them won't work. It's true. Many even. But the list is huge and includes ideas which would reduce spam but demand regulatory engagement which nobody wants to discuss seriously, or financial consequences. Fundamentally I've always felt it's dishonest, disingenuous to combine things you don't like with things which won't work. It's been used as a put down by the email cabal for over two decades. Ietf grey and whitebeards. It's just a mechanistic formalism to define an ingroup and an outgroup now. I whine about it on mail related lists and forums from time to time and have done since it first emerged. Dealing with bad ideas is important, putting new entrants into the problem space off by being patronising is really asocial. The irony is that centralisation of mail into a parallel cabal of Google, O365 and a small number of others is probably altering the surface of email problems by ignoring the list, and doing what they do, for money, and under regulatory pressure. Many of the "it won't work" mob are now finding running a full stack, ipv6 enabled SMTP sender next to impossible. Dkim and spf won't stop reputation agents dismissing them as "bad"
- pjio 3y agoGeneralizations are always wrong (at the least to some degree).
- zelphirkalt 3y agoIf we get enough people writing about "considered harmful" using the very words "considered harmful" as a kind of counter, will we see the next level in form of those being "considered harmful"? ("considered harmful"^3, or perhaps ch-ch-ch?)
- eimrine 3y agoNegative cliches: (...) considered harmful (...) is a fractal of bad design Positive cliches: And now for something completely different New directions in (supersede) topic I hate to see some low-quality articles which just repeat some extraordinary good documents. All these examples I have seen in a short period of time such as one week.
- freedude 3y agoThis a "Considered Harmful" essay about how "Considered Harmful" essay's are considered harmful.