> and likely has never talked to anyone who was writing an OS kernel or driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system https://en.wikipedia.o

> and likely has never talked to anyone who was writing an OS kernel or driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system I think you have to appreciate Dijkstra's comment on goto by the standards of the era he said it. FORTRAN/COBOL/assembly spaghetti code was the norm then. At the time, software problems were scaling extremely quickly. He (and many others) felt that managing complexity was the issue for future development. Modularity and code reuse were barely known. (FORTRAN at the time had an infamous "if less than goto 1, if equal goto 2, if greater goto 3" control flow construct -- and no other conditional control flow!) The UNIX inventors cited Dijkstra's views on structured programming as crucial to the development of a large system like UNIX... even though they did add goto to C :)