Dijkstra passed away in 2002, sometimes I wonder what he would write nowadays given that the world took the opposite direction of everything he deemed as correct in software development.
He never made the argument that goto was considered harmful (the title was not his), the letter itself is a solid argument for why the unbounded goto (as opposed to the, typically, function or lexical scope restricted goto) creates programs that are hard to comprehend. He also, if you read the letter, does not argue for abolishing goto, it's part of the larger case of going toward structured programming.
If you learned programming after about 1990 (probably some time in the 1980s was the real inflection point, but by 1990) you would have been learning structured programming and the argument was moot, because it had won. Every major language used after that time (outside of assembly languages which are inherently unstructured as a language) was already using structured programming so the argument seems superfluous or you end up having people compare the goto he describes to the modern restricted goto, which is not something he would have (strongly) argued against (though certainly against its overuse in some cases).
idk how old you are, but there there was a style in the 70s where goto was the only control flow operator used in a lot of codebases, and it was absolutely horrible.
I'm in my 40s, wasn't coding in the 70s. Horrible use of code is a different thing from removing something entirely, though. Just that almost every language removed goto as a response is kind of amazing to me.
My objective is to extract and discuss interesting fragments from these EWDs. Each of my discussions will appear as a post in one of the following three diaries:
What did Dijkstra do 50 years ago? Check out my diary of the 1960s.
What did Dijkstra do 40 years ago? Check out my diary of the 1970s.
What did Dijkstra do 30 years ago? Check out my diary of the 1980s.***
Dijkstra passed away in 2002, sometimes I wonder what he would write nowadays given that the world took the opposite direction of everything he deemed as correct in software development.
I honestly never got why in college his opinions were just taken as mandates. I never bough into the "goto considered harmful" argument, for example.
He never made the argument that goto was considered harmful (the title was not his), the letter itself is a solid argument for why the unbounded goto (as opposed to the, typically, function or lexical scope restricted goto) creates programs that are hard to comprehend. He also, if you read the letter, does not argue for abolishing goto, it's part of the larger case of going toward structured programming.
If you learned programming after about 1990 (probably some time in the 1980s was the real inflection point, but by 1990) you would have been learning structured programming and the argument was moot, because it had won. Every major language used after that time (outside of assembly languages which are inherently unstructured as a language) was already using structured programming so the argument seems superfluous or you end up having people compare the goto he describes to the modern restricted goto, which is not something he would have (strongly) argued against (though certainly against its overuse in some cases).
idk how old you are, but there there was a style in the 70s where goto was the only control flow operator used in a lot of codebases, and it was absolutely horrible.
I'm in my 40s, wasn't coding in the 70s. Horrible use of code is a different thing from removing something entirely, though. Just that almost every language removed goto as a response is kind of amazing to me.
> Horrible use of code is a different thing from removing something entirely, though.
He didn't argue for that.
The website is maintained by Edgar Graham Daylight who is a devoted follower of Dijkstra - https://www.dijkstrascry.com/about
There is lots of neat information here for Dijkstra fans.
In particular (from https://www.dijkstrascry.com/);
My objective is to extract and discuss interesting fragments from these EWDs. Each of my discussions will appear as a post in one of the following three diaries:
NOTE: Some interesting articles;1) T.H.E. Multiprogramming System - https://www.dijkstrascry.com/node/77
2) Program Execution as a Living Tree - https://www.dijkstrascry.com/node/109
3) Things Dijkstra would like to do - https://www.dijkstrascry.com/node/110