“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful

http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

233 78 11 years ago

jessaustin2• 11 years ago

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.

Now I'm just confused.

kbenson• 11 years ago

The expert troll doesn't need to push his work upon this targets, they push it upon themselves and others for him.

chris_wot• 11 years ago

He ignored his own essay, so even the actual substance of the essay could be considered an existential threat to the essay. I have to wonder though if he ignored his own argument whilst in the process of writing his article, because if he truly did so then it probably should have been a dissertation on modalities which I'm sure we all could have readily ignored without doing ourselves much harm. Thus defeating the point of the article, leading to a resurgence of interest in Structuration.

Or to put it more simply: this essay is a plot by the intelligentsia to make us reason like a madman.

0xdeadbeefbabe3• 11 years ago

I literally can't read another word of this essay because of the logical burden.

eclipxe• 11 years ago

It's called humor

jessaustin2• 11 years ago

whooosh...

joshrotenberg• 11 years ago

I consider your confusion harmful.

AdieuToLogic2• 11 years ago

Considering your consideration of GP's confusion harming the considerateness of your considered position has led me to considerately classify this confusion to be considered harmful as well.

Ouch. Brain freeze!

JustSomeNobody2• 11 years ago

Indeed. I'm over these as well as any of the, "Why I quit X technology" or similarly titled essays. Oh and the "Open letter to Big Corp". You're not that important.

I don't really care why you quit using X. I don't need validation from some blog about what technology to use or not use. I can evaluate X technology on my own, thank you.

pidg• 11 years ago

Let me reach out to you about why I left Gmail for FastMail. It's because if you're not paying for the product... you ARE the product.

Yeah.

SixSigma• 11 years ago

FastMail doesn't do free accounts for new signups any more, just 60 day trials.

JustSomeNobody2• 11 years ago

No I'm not. My user data is a form of currency that I spend in the manner of my choosing. If I choose to spend it at google, it may cost more than, say, fastmail, but it's still my choice.

k__• 11 years ago

The information from those articles isn't the problem. Just the writing style.

They often want to tell you "We're switching from X to Y, because our use-cases aren't that of X (anymore)"

But they write it like "We're switching from X to Y and you should too, because X is really bad for everyone!"

If you ignore the holier-than-you writing style, and try to read these articles like the first example, they have some useful information :)

wwweston• 11 years ago

This might be the flip side of a certain project presentation style.

How often do you see:

"If you have use case X, SoftGood will help you solve problem Y without triggering problem Z. If you have use case K, SoftGood may not be the best fit for you."

"You should use SoftPanacea -- it's design-driven, big-scale, cloud-fronked, makes your life easier, and is awesome!"

serge2k2• 11 years ago

I still like them better than the "X is dead" followed by "long live X" that was a fad for a while.

I vote we focus on eliminating the most annoying of all title formats, the "gate" suffix.

jrcii• 11 years ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=considered%20harmful&type=stor...

mallamanis• 11 years ago

So, is this essay also considered harmful by self-reference?

amelius• 11 years ago

Yes, it is considered harmful to the "Considered Harmful" essays.

0xdeadbeefbabe3• 11 years ago

Another possible title: How to Argue Against Yourself For Fun and Profit.

jwp729• 11 years ago

Maybe not self-referene but reference to the class to which it belongs, cf. Quine's paradox:

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

emodendroket2• 11 years ago

Did you really not see the part of the article at the very beginning addressing this?

0xdeadbeefbabe3• 11 years ago

I was just enjoying this essay when I double checked the title and wondered if I could believe it anymore since it is also a considered harmful essay(?).

CatsoCatsoCatso• 11 years ago

    28 December 2002

Still relevant, unsurprisingly.

gambogi• 11 years ago

Thank you

FreakyT• 11 years ago

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

lectrick3• 11 years ago

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.

jballanc• 11 years ago

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.

amyjess• 11 years ago

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.

antod• 11 years ago

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.

pjscott• 11 years ago

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.

ak392• 11 years ago

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. :-(

dimino• 11 years ago

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.

davesque2• 11 years ago

The grammatical construction "Blah Blah Considered Harmful" has always bugged me...it doesn't seem proper. Shouldn't it be something like "Blah Blah Should Be Considered Harmful"?

acbart• 11 years ago

Technically speaking, if anyone has ever said that Blah Blah is harmful, than it has been considered harmful. The latter construction with Should Be is a more polite form, but the former is also correct if it's ever been true once.

davesque2• 11 years ago

I know what you mean and I agree. I still think it sounds awkward.

freyr• 11 years ago

Think of it as a newspaper title. There's an implied "XYZ Considered Harmful [by Experts]." That is the original context, a letter written by Dijkstra to the editor of Communications of the ACM, where the editor penned the title.

emodendroket2• 11 years ago

"By the author of this piece" is implied.

ninjakeyboard• 11 years ago

lol META - was this post a retort to the "gitflow considered harmful" article?

88e282102ae2e5b• 11 years ago

Not understanding the hate for the title. It's just the author trying to be ironic and clever. Not everything has to be taken literally.

peterkelly2• 11 years ago

I've always seen the inclusion "considered harmful" in a title as sort of a comedic device, not to be taken as seriously as the author does. It's a signal that "I'm about to say something opinionated; if you're easily offended, you probably don't want to read this". The article itself is such an example.

I'd much rather read a forceful, strong argument that contains some controversial claims than a piss-weak "perceived benefits and weaknesses of" essay, as the author suggests. Sometimes treating a topic brutally can get your point across more effectively. For example, some of James Mickens' more colourful writing demonstrates this.

aoeuasdf1• 11 years ago

So, tl;dr, you consider "'Considered Harmful' Essays Considered Harmful" harmful?

peterkelly2• 11 years ago

Almost to the extent of goto statements :)

leothekim• 11 years ago

I would personally like to replace the words "considered harmful" with "is bad news bears"[1], as usually that fits better with whatever it is that's.. well, considered harmful. Come on, Hacker News! If we all focus, we can make this happen!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_News_Bears

Thetawaves• 11 years ago

I personally love the 'considered harmful' essays. They are usually used to describe faults in popular technology that most people seem to be blind to. They offer the reader a chance to move problems out of the unknown unknown.

Many times I find the points identified in the articles to be unfounded, and those points are easily dismissed. But every once in a while there is a real genuine problem.

I would rather dismiss 10 irrelevant points than miss the one show stopping fault identified in the article.

ak392• 11 years ago

What a great piece of writing. This could do so well as a preface to my all time favourite "programming" book: "The Pragmatic Programmer" written by Hunt & Thomas.

Also, IMO, the worst of such "considered harmful" essays were those that advised against the use of stored procedures and programmatic constructs directly on relational databases in favour of the shiny new hive-mind created ORMs.

The funny thing is, just as the best ORM technologies are beginning to sort their shyte out, we are seeing essays that they are now considered harmful. Reboot.

ajkjk• 11 years ago

You know, I think there might be a meta-analog to Godwin's law: that any meta-argument about arguing on the Internet eventually contains a reference to Godwin's law itself.

Since Hitler references are invariably followed by someone pointing out that Godwin's prophecy has been fulfilled, this reduces to a simply corollary of the law itself.

normloman2• 11 years ago

Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say. So we get this glut of self important "considered harmful" essays. And we're all guilty.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say.

The advice needs to be updated slightly, then, to clarify the apparent confusion: you should, if you can, write essays for all those reasons, but step one of writing an essay for those purposes is find something meaningful to say.

vonmoltke2• 11 years ago

So only people with meaningful things to say or build should get noticed and hired?

knieveltech2• 11 years ago

No. I'm getting pretty tired of the notion that the only valuable discourse is pleasant, up-beat, and optimistic. This notion attempts to stifle entire swaths of the emotional spectrum and has at it's heart censorship based on a mainstream aversion to anything that smacks of confrontation or conflict. Up with opinionated, confrontational speech.

techiferous• 11 years ago

I disagree. If you look at what happens to the brain when it gets angry, nuance is lost in favor of over-simplified black-and-white thinking. I do agree with you that sharing conflicting points of view is good. Too much passion, however, can cloud reason.

knieveltech2• 11 years ago

To clarify I'm not advocating for rage-filled screeds as a viable method of communicating nuanced information, or even as a viable method of communication. As you said sharing conflicting viewpoints is valuable. I take issue with the suggestion that this is only valuable if the conflict is framed in appealing language or "toned down" to "acceptable" levels, whatever those are. Conflict is ok. Resolving it is how we get shit done.

bevacqua• 11 years ago

It's funny that I was thinking today about writing an article with this exact same title. "Considered harmful" articles are just one person's opinion, most of the time.

Thrymr• 11 years ago

"They’ve become boring clichés. Nobody really wants to read “considered harmful” essays any more, because we’ve seen them a thousand times before and didn’t really learn anything from them, since we were too busy being annoyed to really listen to the arguments presented."

It's a boring and pompous cliché. In 1968, it was original. Now, write your own title.

hamburglar• 11 years ago

My sentiment exactly. If I wrote this post, it would have been titled "Considered harmful" Essays Considered Boring

smitherfield• 11 years ago

I've always thought of "considered harmful" titles as a cute bit of nerd humor, precisely because it's such a pompous and ridiculous-sounding phrase that it's very hard to say with a straight face. I'd usually take it to mean that the author doesn't take him or herself too seriously and knows that the matter they're discussing is ultimately pretty trivial.

newobj• 11 years ago

Yeah, burn this tired rhetorical device to the ground, along with the "open letter".

thekevan• 11 years ago

Every time I see one of these "considered harmful" essays, I immediately assume the person writing it considers all their own opinions to be facts and dissenting opinions to always be wrong.

pc2g4d• 11 years ago

"Considered Harmful" is a cliche but not really harmful, unless you're the author and want to be viewed as hip/cutting-edge/cool.

I'd say that driving "Considered Harmful" out of the conversation should be considered harmful. The "considered harmful" titles are great because they provide a very concise encapsulation of the contents of the essay. When I see "X considered harmful" I immediately know that the work will be arguing against X. I've read a number of these because I want to see what there is to be said against things that I often take for granted, e.g. the utility of Angular or whatever.

johnx123-up• 11 years ago

Context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059

“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful

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