March 1968
Dijkstra: Go To considered harmful
Dijkstra's letter to the Communications of the ACM editor — titled "GoA language from Google — simple syntax, fast compilation, and built-in concurrency via goroutines. To Statement Considered Harmful" — attacks unstructured jumps in code.
Quote
“For a number of years I have been familiar with the observed development that program code containing go to statements cancels out the advantages of structured programming.”
What it was for
The title became a meme decades before Twitter. FortranFormula Translation — one of the first high-level languages, dominant in science and engineering. and BASICBeginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — an early programming language designed for ease of learning. programmers had lived on GOTO; Dijkstra argued that structured control flow made programs easier to reason about. The debate still echoes whenever someone reaches for a quick escape hatch.
People
- Edsger Dijkstra — researcher
Why it's here
One of the earliest flame wars in software engineering, dressed as a one-page letter.
Why it mattered
It helped mainstream structured programming and later influenced language design.
What it solved
Spaghetti code from arbitrary jumps was hard to verify and maintain.
Media
ImageEdsger W. DijkstraHamilton Richards, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons