4 ms·

Early on in my career as a summer intern I had to port a piece of industrial equipment code that someone new to programming had written on an Apple II over to a

by gregw2 3y ago

Early on in my career as a summer intern I had to port a piece of industrial equipment code that someone new to programming had written on an Apple II over to an IBM PC infrastructure (since Apples were being discontinued.) Some features were supposed to be added to the code as part of the port. The code was littered with gotos. Let’s say it was a 2000 line program with 100 gotos and no comments. It was very hard to follow the code flow. The “structured programming”/procedural style of naming each bit of (say) 25-50 lines of code according to its purpose and providing clear entrance and exit points was a huge advance in making code easier to work with by anyone other than its original author. Huge. All variables were also global in those days, there were not locally scoped variables. This made gotos even worse. Reasoning about the state of a program combining global variables and lots of gotos could get quite complex for someone new working on an unfamiliar code base. People don’t misuse goto nowdays because teachers, books, articles don’t teach it as a core primitive for flow control, due to shame. So now it’s kind of an advanced feature and not a problem. But back in the day, it made a real mess in the hands of a certain percentage of coders who invariably existed and lazily kept reusing existing lines of code, one spaghetti-mess of a goto at a time. If you’ve ever worked with someone else’s extremely/overly abstracted “DRY” code it was like that but 10x worse.

bonki 3y ago
I am far from saying that code like this doesn't and didn't exist, it does and it did a lot more back in the day, absolutely. But having read my fair share of spaghetti code written by bad programmers I can also say that you don't need gotos to make code bad and unreadable. If someone doesn't know know how to properly structure code they will manage just fine without a single goto and beyond some point it doesn't matter anymore if you add goto to the recipe since it's that bad already. You mention shame and teaching and that's a valid point historically, I was told and taught the same things and wouldn't use goto at all until I figured out (myself) that certain kinds of cleanups and control flows become much less spaghetti and more readable by using goto. Instead of shaming and teaching a silly dogma "just because" people could have taught how to use it properly in those few idiomatic use cases. It's not rocket science. It's a shame (pun slightly intended) that some code is actually less readable than it could be just because someone was taught to never use goto because it was the easier explanation. It's like lying to children because you think they can't handle an honest explanation, in almost all cases it will bite you in the ass at some point.

by gregw2 3y ago

bonki 3y ago

I am far from saying that code like this doesn't and didn't exist, it does and it did a lot more back in the day, absolutely. But having read my fair share of spaghetti code written by bad programmers I can also say that you don't need gotos to make code bad and unreadable. If someone doesn't know know how to properly structure code they will manage just fine without a single goto and beyond some point it doesn't matter anymore if you add goto to the recipe since it's that bad already. You mention shame and teaching and that's a valid point historically, I was told and taught the same things and wouldn't use goto at all until I figured out (myself) that certain kinds of cleanups and control flows become much less spaghetti and more readable by using goto. Instead of shaming and teaching a silly dogma "just because" people could have taught how to use it properly in those few idiomatic use cases. It's not rocket science. It's a shame (pun slightly intended) that some code is actually less readable than it could be just because someone was taught to never use goto because it was the easier explanation. It's like lying to children because you think they can't handle an honest explanation, in almost all cases it will bite you in the ass at some point.