Ancient Web: Eric Meyer Parodied the Considered Harmful Essay

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

In a heated programming debate, an essay title can sound like a verdict before anyone reads its argument. Eric Meyer was tired of one particularly recognizable verdict.

Visit Eric Meyer's 2002 essay.

His December 28, 2002 article is titled “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful. The structure is deliberately comic: it criticizes an established way of naming technical objections by using that naming convention itself.

Meyer places the tradition in the context of Edsger Dijkstra's influential 1968 essay about the go-to statement. He says a contemporary search found thousands of documents repeating the phrase in discussions that ranged from programming design to Web standards. His reported search totals are observations from late 2002, not measurements of today's Internet.

When disagreement becomes a template

Meyer argues that confidently declaring a practice harmful can turn an engineering argument into a contest of positions. Participants dig in, undecided observers become annoyed, and the stock headline becomes too familiar to communicate much at all.

His examples are drawn from the sort of networked technical debates in which people wrote long responses, cited each other's essays, and linked to archives maintained by individual authors. The article mentions the Jargon File, an account of Dijkstra's essay, search results, and other commentators including Tantek Çelik.

The concluding section suggests other formats. A writer might consider the strengths and weaknesses of a disputed practice, describe what the other side believes, or compare approaches rather than simply declaring one unacceptable.

There is a second layer of humor. Meyer imagines an especially blatant example with the very same title as his own article. He acknowledges the title's attention-seeking potential rather than pretending his parody is innocent of it.

Unlike a generic tutorial, this webpage has a precise historical date and a clear author. It survives with the older hyperlink structure intact, even when destinations have aged or moved. A reader can trace the shape of a standards-era discussion by following what Meyer considered important enough to cite.

The piece also preserves the social nature of early technical writing. Developers were not only inventing software; they were inventing ways to disagree about it in public.

Read Meyer's original argument and acknowledgments.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.