In computer science, there is nothing more fundamental and intuitive than control structures. Every student learned about them in the first few weeks of any computer science program. We could not code without them, period. But they are not set in stone: we did get rid of the infamous GOTO in the 80s!
At the pre-ALGOL meeting held in 1959 Heinz Zemanek explicitly threw doubt on the necessity for GOTO statements; at the time no one paid attention to his remark, including Edsger W. Dijkstra, who later became the iconic opponent of GOTO.[3] The 1970s and 1980s saw a decline in the use of GOTO statements in favor of the « structured programming » paradigm, with goto criticized as leading to « unmaintainable spaghetti code«
