language considered harmful II
fragment 3, mar 08
i used (nearly) no text here (if language is harmful … ? ;–)
about the title, by the way: language considered harmful derives from the letter “A Case against the GO TO Statement” by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, published as “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” in a computer journal in 1968.
i didn’t know anything about this article. i guess, i have learned about Dijkstra, when i read news about his death at www.heise.de in 2002. this way, i think, i’ve heard about Go To Statement Considered Harmful, which sounded cool in my ears so i rememered it until now.
all i knew until now about that goto-statement was that it is a jump-back-to-previous-position-command in programming languages like BASIC, which leads to “spaghetti-code” when the the code with its jump-commands is visualised by a flow-chart or what.
when i worked on fragment 1, i saw similarities between the loops in programming code and the loops created by human language which forces back on the brain which creates the language. so i found it very cool and funny to call this edition “language considered harmful”.
when i worked on fragment 3, i first wanted to sketch a bigger thing about language, but i failed and then i broke it down to a smaller thing and put it into the same title (and started a series?).
yeah, i thought i’m very funny but today i did a little research and i found:
- a small entry in wikipedia about the “considered harmful”-slogan, and
- a blog-entry about this article (by a writer called Scott Rosenberg, who sais: “The content of Dijkstra’s brief essay itself is far less widely known than its title.”), and
- a retrospective by some David Tribble who writes: “The letter has become quite famous (or infamous, depending on your feelings about goto statements) in the 40 years since it was first published, and is probably the most often cited document about any topic of programming. It is also probably the least read document in all of programming lore.”
–> so, i unconsciously reproduced a very, very old joke … :-)
i, myself, didn’t read “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” until now (but today i read the manuscript (4 scanned pages)).
in “A Case against the GO TO Statement“, Dijkstra thinks about the difference of the programming code (which is static text) and the running program (which is a dynamic process) and the problem of getting clear, how a program could come to a certain result/state. for this, one have to map the written code with the program-state and the goto-statement seems to have made this difficult.
