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Go To Statement Considered Harmful
Dijkstra's March 1968 letter to the Communications of the ACM — a one-and-a-half-page argument that arbitrary jumps destroy the possibility of reasoning about a program, and the founding document of structured programming.
"Go To Statement Considered Harmful" is the most famous short paper in the history of computing. Published as a letter to the editor in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM, its original title was "A Case Against the Go To Statement"; editor Niklaus Wirth changed it to the phrasing that would spawn hundreds of imitators. The argument was not aesthetic. Dijkstra claimed that a program written with unrestricted go to statements cannot be analyzed by the only method human beings have for thinking about complex systems: decomposition into parts that can be understood independently and composed into an understanding of the whole. The go to made programs fail not by producing wrong answers but by producing answers whose correctness could not be demonstrated.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The 1960s were a period in which the gap between the machines' capabilities and the profession's ability to program them reliably was becoming