Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful | Communications of the ACM
dl.acm.org

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.

  • 0x0
    1·
    6 months ago

    I get that but it seems as though no one cares at all about efficiency these days.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      People have been complaining about this exact thing forever. Even back when “people cared about efficiency”.

    • BatmanAoD
      1·
      6 months ago

      Does the catchphrase “blazing fast” ring any bells? Some people care.

      (Arguably that’s just the pendulum swinging the other way; Ruby, Python, and Java ruled the software world for a while, and I think that’s a large part of why the Go and Rust communities make such a big deal about speed.)