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Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

The thing that always bothered me about "Considered harmful" titles is that, when you title your own article that, you're just pompously referring to yourself in the third person.

The reason they are in the passive voice is that the original "considered harmful" essay was a letter to the editor, and therefore was titled not by the author, but by the editor[1]. Therefore, to expand out the subject of the sentence, the title was actually saying "Go To Statement Considered Harmful [by Edsger Dijkstra]".

[1]: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EW...

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful

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A traditional alternative to considered-harmful titles is titles of the form "Why X is not my favorite thing-that-X-is". The classic example is Brian Kernighan's article "Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language", but it works for just about anything. "Why git flow is not my favorite versioning method" works fine. "Why considered-harmful essays are not my favorite method of critique" is less cute, but quite polite. "Why goto is not my favorite control-flow construct" might be pushing it, though.

Thanks for the Kernighan reference. It is probably the single most important reason behind the ignorant meme in tech/programming circles that Object Pascal / Delphi (not Pascal!) is an obsolete language. :-(

I hadn't read it before, but almost none of the critiques in that article apply to delphi, so someone who takes it as a serious modern day critique clearly knows nothing about delphi.

Right. I just found this comment: "It only took some minor additions and extensions to turn Pascal into something that was found useful for industrial strength programming. Witness Turbo Pascal and VAX Pascal, for example. Kernighan's paper could have taken the angle of "What Pascal Needs to Become a Very Useful Language," which would have come across as less angry."

Yeah, I think "I don't like this" should be different from "this is actually bad in tangible and measurable ways".

"Stuck Accelerator Pedals in Toyotas Considered Harmful" makes sense, but "Why stuck accelerator pedals in Toyotas are not my favorite accelerator pedals" isn't really descriptive of the issue, although is kind of funny as a title.

To put it another way, there is a place for both titles, but "Considered Harmful" should be reserved for dispassionate analysis.

Glad to see this, as I was surprised that there was an entire post about the harm that "considered harmful" essays caused without even citing the original reference that started the whole hoopla, the very-opinionated, very-brilliant and very-legendary Edsger Dijkstra.

On the "very-opinionated" point, I'm particularly fond of Alan Kay's quote:

> I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

Ha! Yeah.

The older I get the more immune I feel to arrogance; to me it's a symptom of frustration coming from high skill colliding with the rest of the world's lack thereof.

I've always found that quote to be particularly douchey. Then again, I do think that Dijkstra's contributions to CS were more important than Kay's, too, but I suspect that I might not be in the majority there...

Wikipedia's article on Dijkstra says:

"He was the first to make the claim that programming is so inherently complex that (...)"

Meanwhile Alan Kay had 12 year old kids making computer games (videos on Web Archive).

Dijkstra contributed algorithms. In that sense he contributed as a mathematician. That doesn't diminish what he did. But it does not compare with what Alan Kay did for the sum of these two parts: computers, and people.

Programming is not all of CS, and the fact that everyone and their mom are doing OO does not take away from anything of what Dijkstra said. On a more "people" level, I think that arguing for more rigor and formal approaches to programming is truly more important that creating the next generation of code monkeys. I agree that Kay's work has had much more practical influence, but I don't think it has been necessarily any better because of that. But as I said in the original comment, I'm probably in the minority on this.

Kay : Dijkstra :: Ruby : Haskell

Dijkstra was correct in saying that you don't even need a computer to do "Computer Science," all you need is a pencil, paper, and a mental model of what you're trying to do given computer constraints.

Dijkstra more theoretical; Kay more hands-on.

I think BOTH are necessary, or at least important.

I think that's a pretty good analogy, though maybe you should s/ruby/objective-c/ to bring it closer to smalltalk :)

There is theoretical, and then there is theoretical: one is privately fueled and produces real-world industry-strong gems like Haskell; the other is publicly fueled and produces concepts such as self-stabilization and superstabilization.

If Dijkstra is so awesome someone should write a Wikipedia article with more important achievements and less medals.

I don't really understand what you mean by privately or publicly-fueled theory, but anyway...

Instead of waiting for someone to write on the wiki, you could go out there and google a bit.

Very briefly: he made major contributions to compiler and OS design (including the first Algol compiler and a whole OS, the THE OS), devised two fundamental graph algorithms (shortest path and spanning tree), and spearheaded making programming into a serious discipline rooted in maths (along the way pretty much giving birth to structured programming).

He also wrote (longhand!) over a thousand essays on CS and related topics, which are (as far as I've read, and I've read quite a few) all a joy to read.

You can start here: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/dijkstra_1053701.cfm and here: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/

I think they are sufficiently different that it is not possible to compare importance on an objective basis.

Dijkstra worked in Computer Science. And the relevant quote there is that "Computer Science is no more about computers, than Astronomy is about telescopes.”

Dr. Kay did phenomenally important work with computers and programming. It’s important in its own right. Either of us could say that we prefer to dwell on the ramifications of one or the other.

I think it’s safe to say that if you took either of their contributions away outright, our world in 2015 would be much poorer for it.

Now if you want a good Dr. Kay quote, “Programming is a Pop Culture” has to be high on the list. I think he’s deeply right about that, but being right doesn’t in any way tarnish the nano-Dijkstras associated with damning the entire field.

The thing is, Dijsktra also did a lot of practical work (first Algol compiler, an OS, structured programming), so I wouldn't discount him as just a theoretician, either.

I agree that they both did very important contributions, and that there's probably no way to compare their magnitude, so it comes down to personal interpretation, there's no argument there. Still, I believe the arrogance comment by Kay was douchey :)

Perhaps a “Kay” should be a measure worth approximately one deci-Dijkstra.

Funny thing is, he didn't even call it that. His title was "A Case against the GO TO Statement". His editor Niklaus Wirth (yes, the guy who created Pascal and a ton of other languages) renamed it because he wanted to get people's attention and rustle some jimmies.

Are you sure about that? Did you skip the 'What Are “Considered Harmful” Essays?' section near the top?

Seems the original reference is mentioned quite clearly. quote:

> The Jargon File has a short entry on “considered harmful” that encapsulates the genesis of such essays:

> Edsger W. Dijkstra’s note in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM, “Go To Statement Considered Harmful,” fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars…. As it turns out, the title under which the letter appeared was actually supplied by CACM’s editor, Niklaus Wirth.

> The controversy resulting from the article’s publication became so heated that the CACM subsequently decided to never again publish pieces with such assertive positions.

Granted some of the links have since rotted over the last 13yrs though.

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