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.

  • NaoPbEnglish
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    5 months ago
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    Please don’t link to medium articles. That page is terrible to visit.

    • leftzero
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      5 months ago
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      Looks fine on Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin. 🤷‍♂️

      • NaoPbEnglish
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        5 months ago
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        I’m running exactly the same and it doesn’t look fine on my end.

        • leftzero
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          5 months ago
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          Huh. Maybe it’s NoScript, then.

          • NaoPbEnglish
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            5 months ago
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            Could be. I’m getting forced to make an account and such. That’s why I hate medium.