Go To Statement Considered Harmful Alive

Dijkstra's letter argued that 'the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements' — because a program's textual order should match its execution order, and GOTO destroys that correspondence. Editor Niklaus Wirth supplied the famous title.

The argument won: structured control flow became the default, and new languages dropped GOTO or caged it (Java, Python have none; C's survives unused). 'X Considered Harmful' became a running editorial formula — which Dijkstra himself found ironic given the title wasn't his.