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

abbadon420@lemm.ee to Programming@programming.dev – 100 points – Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful | Communications of the ACM
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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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For C it makes sense. The point of C is that it can work as a low level language. Basically, everything doable with assembly SHOULD be doable with C, and that's why we don't need another low level language that's basically C with goto.

Even though almost all of C users should never use goto.

C is one of the few languages where using goto makes sense as a poor man's local error/cleanup handler.

Yeah. Without a proper error handling mechanism, goto is actually useful for once.