cons
= C =
console
considered harmful adj.
[very common] Edsger
W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of the
ACM", "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first
salvo in the structured programming wars (text at
http://www.acm.org/classics). Amusingly, the ACM considered
the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by
policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position
against a coding practice. (Years afterwards, a contrary view was
uttered in a CACM letter called, inevitably, "`Goto considered
harmful' considered harmful'"'. In the ensuing decades, a large
number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the
form "X considered Y". The structured-programming wars
eventually blew over with the realization that both sides were
wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor
in-joke (the `considered silly' found at various places in this
lexicon is related).
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.