“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful

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…

+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.

There was nothing offensive or harmful in Dijkstra's original article about the go-to statement; on the contrary, it was brilliant and for many people (including me) communicated a deep and lasting insight in a flash.

I've learned to be very skeptical of these, as we'll see waves of these appear on HN and Reddit occasionally. Most times it's opinionated nonsense.