29 Go To Statement Considered Harmful (1968)

The movement toward "structured programming" did not happen all at once. It evolved as the software industry matured: compilers got better, so programmers were less motivated to write tricky code in order to save a few compute steps or a few bytes of program memory; and systems got bigger, so teams were more motivated to write comprehensible code with easily explained modular structure. Early processors lacked stack operations. By 1968 recursion was no longer exotic and was architecturally supported, and looping structures like while were becoming common in programming languages (this paper was published about the time Wirth was designing the Pascal language).