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Title
Weblogging Considered Harmful
Description
About the Weblogger
My name is Brennan M. O'Keefe. I'm originally from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but these days, I live in the St. Louis area. I work as an MIS programmer for a manufacturing company based here in St. Louis.
[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/). As it turns out, the title under which the letter appeared was actually supplied by CACM's editor, Niklaus Wirth. 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).
When I read this Jargon File entry, I thought it would make a fantastic name for a website. When I began to take an interest in weblogs back in 1999, and started my own on Pitas in early 2000, that's the name I decided to go with. I started using variations on the name (harmful, harmfulguy) as a userid on other weblog-related sites, and then other sites as well. Over time, I've adopted the phrase as a sort of personal brandname.
Contact
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- St. Louis Missouri
- United States 63146
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- +1.3148517487
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