
GOTO considered helpful - jmount
http://erehweb.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/goto-considered-helpful/
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CodeMage
I can identify with this article. My own experience makes me agree with it
completely.

At the age of 7, I learned BASIC on Spectrum 48. At the age of 9, I wrote a
program for my mom to use in her biology class. It's still the most awful
spaghetti programming I can remember seeing in my life. It had some really
toxic uses of GOTO, but I remember it also had a few uses of GOTO which were
actually attempts at more structured programming (GOTO X simulating a
switch/case).

Fast forward to the age of 12 and Oxford Pascal on Commodore 64. Programming
without line numbers (or even memory addresses like in assembler) seemed like
a novel approach, but I didn't have much trouble getting used to repeat..until
and while..do, especially when I realized that I _finally_ didn't have to
worry about "renumbering".

Fast forward to today. At work I use Java _and_ C _and_ C++ _and_ Python on a
regular basis. As a hobby I use ActionScript 3 for game development. I've had
fun writing an application in Common Lisp, fooling around in Haskell and
messing around with Io.

I once heard a university professor say "If you've programmed in BASIC once,
you're scarred for the rest of your life." I don't feel scarred. Honestly, if
someone tried to teach me programming without GOTO at the age of 7, I'm not
sure I would've grokked it. Sure, I might have, but my point is that even
though that's not the way it happened, even though I've been exposed to GOTO
for 5 years of my life, I'm not a bad programmer because of it.

