In 1968, Edsger Dijkstra published a letter titled “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” in Communications of the ACM, politely suggesting that unrestricted GOTO statements made programs impossible to reason about. The response from practicing programmers was approximately what you’d expect if someone suggested they were holding their keyboard wrong. GOTO had been the backbone of assembly and early FORTRAN; removing it felt like surgery without anaesthetic. Structured programming eventually won, and GOTO was relegated to the dustbin of bad practice — except in C, where it persists to this day, used occasionally for error-handling cleanup and reliably triggering arguments in every code review it appears in. Dijkstra, one suspects, would have had opinions about those too.
