As I’m sure many of you do, I read xkcd and often get a pretty good chuckle. Occasionally, one strip comes along that is just so relevant to my life (or profession in this case), that it makes me laugh even harder.
Computer Science is a strange discipline in a lot of ways. Programming languages have a wide variety of uses, but learning when to use what features is the hard part.
So teachers take to telling their students that there are certain features of languages that you should just absolutely never use — like the GOTO.
Years of experience in the profession have taught me that GOTOs exist for a reason — as does every feature of a programming language — and there are times that it can be used to great effect.
Alas, no matter how much experience I have or how many legitimate reasons I can find to use the GOTO statement, I can never type those four letters without feeling a little bit dirty.
That actually happened to me once. It wasn’t pretty …