Trivia: Name that paper
October 14, 2006 by Mark Miller
It just occurred to me the other day to ask this, and have some fun. This is a follow-up to my blog post “Exploring Squeak and Seaside”.
Avi Bryant’s blog, named “HREF Considered Harmful”, is a play on the title of a famous computer science paper. What was the name of that paper, and who wrote it? Hint: this relates to an earlier blog post I wrote.
The paper was “Goto considered harmful,” by Edgser W. Djkstra. which appeared in CACM in 1968. It was a very short article, about half a page, but it was a conceptual earthquake. In the 1970’s, we (cs students) all had to read it.
His point was that the goto statement led to spaghetti code, and if you adopted a discipline of avoiding it, you could force yourself to write structured code. A radical idea at the time.
I am surprised that it took so long for someone to reply to this question.
You are right! I’m glad somebody responded. I was beginning to think either people didn’t know the answer or were just ignoring it.