The usual phrasing is "X considered harmful," which is a passive sentence and doesn't actually say who considers it harmful. Originally it was used from a position of authority ; E. W. Dijkstra made about forty years of very important contributions to computer science, most of them more significant than: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T... .
Today it's complaining that an academic organization charges for access to papers ( http://se9book.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/acm-considered-harmf... ) or warning about a base feature in a family of languages ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/array... ). One of these is an opinion from an unsatisfied customer ("I don't like the way ACM charges for papers and requires copyright assignment"), and the other is a pretty important point about a language from one of its designers ("Arrays don't belong in public APIs in .NET languages").
No, it's pretty much always been about petty complaints. As it turns out, Wirth changed the title precisely because it was inflammatory. The first documented use of it is a complaint about rent control: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004675.h...
Today it's complaining that an academic organization charges for access to papers ( http://se9book.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/acm-considered-harmf... ) or warning about a base feature in a family of languages ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/array... ). One of these is an opinion from an unsatisfied customer ("I don't like the way ACM charges for papers and requires copyright assignment"), and the other is a pretty important point about a language from one of its designers ("Arrays don't belong in public APIs in .NET languages").