In this letter, Dijkstra talks about readability and maintainability in a time where those topics were rarely talked about (1968). This letter was one of the main causes why modern programmers don’t have to trouble themselves with goto statements. Older languages like Java and C# still have a (discouraged) goto statement, because they (mindlessly) copied it from C, which (mindlessly) copied it from Assembly, but more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin don’t even have a goto statement anymore.

  • huginn@feddit.it
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    5 months ago

    There’s a solid reason for goto in C.

    Bringing goto into Java was (and is) idiotic.

    If you’re trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your code then you’ll need those optimizations.

    But any higher level language than C the entire point is to write easily maintainable and useful code that any idiot can go, read and update. A goto is antithetical to readability.