Considered harmful is a part of a phrasal template "X considered harmful". As of 2009 [update] , its snowclones have been used in the titles of at least 65 critical essays in computer science and related disciplines. [1] Its use in this context originated with a 1968 letter by Edsger Dijkstra published as "Go To Statement Considered Harmful".
Considered harmful was already a journalistic cliché used in headlines, well before the Dijkstra article, as in, for example, the headline over a letter published in 1949 in The New York Times : "Rent Control Controversy / Enacting Now of Hasty Legislation Considered Harmful". [2]
Considered harmful was popularized among computer scientists by Edsger Dijkstra's letter "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", [3] [4] published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM (CACM), in which he criticized the excessive use of the GOTO statement in programming languages of the day and advocated structured programming instead. [5] The original title of the letter, as submitted to CACM, was "A Case Against the Goto Statement", but CACM editor Niklaus Wirth changed the title to "Goto Statement Considered Harmful". [6] Regarding this new title, Donald Knuth quipped that "Dr. Goto cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated." [7]
Frank Rubin published a criticism of Dijkstra's letter in the March 1987 CACM where it appeared under the title 'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful. [8] The May 1987 CACM printed further replies, both for and against, under the title '"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?. [9] Dijkstra's own response to this controversy was titled On a Somewhat Disappointing Correspondence. [10]
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Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, mathematician, and science essayist.
Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed at improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making extensive use of the structured control flow constructs of selection (if/then/else) and repetition, block structures, and subroutines.
Dekker's algorithm is the first known correct solution to the mutual exclusion problem in concurrent programming where processes only communicate via shared memory. The solution is attributed to Dutch mathematician Th. J. Dekker by Edsger W. Dijkstra in an unpublished paper on sequential process descriptions and his manuscript on cooperating sequential processes. It allows two threads to share a single-use resource without conflict, using only shared memory for communication.
Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.
In computer programming, a block or code block or block of code is a lexical structure of source code which is grouped together. Blocks consist of one or more declarations and statements. A programming language that permits the creation of blocks, including blocks nested within other blocks, is called a block-structured programming language. Blocks are fundamental to structured programming, where control structures are formed from blocks.
"On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science" is a 1988 scholarly article by E. W. Dijkstra which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness.
In computer programming, COMEFROM is an obscure control flow structure used in some programming languages, originally as a joke. COMEFROM is the inverse of GOTO in that it can take the execution state from any arbitrary point in code to a COMEFROM statement.
The structured program theorem, also called the Böhm–Jacopini theorem, is a result in programming language theory. It states that a class of control-flow graphs can compute any computable function if it combines subprograms in only three specific ways. These are
The THE multiprogramming system or THE OS was a computer operating system designed by a team led by Edsger W. Dijkstra, described in monographs in 1965-66 and published in 1968. Dijkstra never named the system; "THE" is simply the abbreviation of "Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven", then the name of the Eindhoven University of Technology of the Netherlands. The THE system was primarily a batch system that supported multitasking; it was not designed as a multi-user operating system. It was much like the SDS 940, but "the set of processes in the THE system was static".
A snowclone is a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants. The term was coined in 2004, derived from journalistic clichés that referred to the number of Eskimo words for snow.
In computer programming, explicit parallelism is the representation of concurrent computations using primitives in the form of operators, function calls or special-purpose directives. Most parallel primitives are related to process synchronization, communication and process partitioning. As they seldom contribute to actually carry out the intended computation of the program but, rather, structure it, their computational cost is often considered as overhead.
Thread Level Speculation (TLS), also known as Speculative Multi-threading, or Speculative Parallelization, is a technique to speculatively execute a section of computer code that is anticipated to be executed later in parallel with the normal execution on a separate independent thread. Such a speculative thread may need to make assumptions about the values of input variables. If these prove to be invalid, then the portions of the speculative thread that rely on these input variables will need to be discarded and squashed. If the assumptions are correct the program can complete in a shorter time provided the thread was able to be scheduled efficiently.
David Peleg is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, holding the Norman D. Cohen Professorial Chair of Computer Sciences, and the present dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science in Weizmann Institute. His main research interests are algorithms, computer networks, and distributed computing. Many of his papers deal with a combination of all three.
Non-structured programming is the historically earliest programming paradigm capable of creating Turing-complete algorithms. It is often contrasted with the structured programming paradigm, in particular with the use of unstructured control flow using goto statements or equivalent. The distinction was particularly stressed by the publication of the influential "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" open letter in 1968 by Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, who coined the term "structured programming".
Larry Joseph Stockmeyer was an American computer scientist. He was one of the pioneers in the field of computational complexity theory, and he also worked in the field of distributed computing. He died of pancreatic cancer.
Goto is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It performs a one-way transfer of control to another line of code; in contrast a function call normally returns control. The jumped-to locations are usually identified using labels, though some languages use line numbers. At the machine code level, a goto is a form of branch or jump statement, in some cases combined with a stack adjustment. Many languages support the goto statement, and many do not.
Baruch Awerbuch is an Israeli-American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his research on distributed computing.
Daniel (Danny) Dolev is an Israeli computer scientist known for his research in cryptography and distributed computing. He holds the Berthold Badler Chair in Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a member of the scientific council of the European Research Council.
Hagit Attiya is an Israeli computer scientist who holds the Harry W. Labov and Charlotte Ullman Labov Academic Chair of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Her research is in the area of distributed computing.
The unbridled use of the go to statement has as an immediate consequence that it becomes terribly hard to find a meaningful set of coordinates in which to describe the process progress. ... The go to statement as it stands is just too primitive, it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one's program.