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!
“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
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Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#32I 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.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#33Indeed. 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.
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.
FastMail doesn't do free accounts for new signups any more, just 60 day trials.
:)
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#34The 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…
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…
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. :-(
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#35What 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.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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...
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#37You 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.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#39So, is this essay also considered harmful by self-reference?
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.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."