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[History] An editor letter by Edsger Dijkstra, titled: "go to statements considered harmful" (march 1968). (dl.acm.org)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Java does not support goto.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (3 children)

And yet it's still easy to write spaghetti code in Java. Just abuse inheritance. Where is this function implemented? No one knows but the compiler!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

That doesn't make it spaghetti code though. In well-written OOP code you shouldn't care where a function is implemented. The problem is a much too high level of abstraction. If your high level code is so abstract that it is only running tasks and handling messages there's no way to write it in a way that prevents mistakes because you couldn't possibly know what the actual implementations do.

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