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	<title>Comments on: Re: Go-to statement considered harmful</title>
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	<link>http://thetarpit.org/2014/re-go-to-statement-considered-harmful</link>
	<description>"Now I feel like I know less about what that blog is about than I did before."</description>
	<pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:24:19 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>By: spyked</title>
		<link>http://thetarpit.org/2014/re-go-to-statement-considered-harmful#comment-7792</link>
		<dc:creator>spyked</dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2026 08:33:32 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description>Let the note remain here that Dijkstra's concern is a legitimate one even today, although it goes beyond the realm of mere "goto statements".

The problem, restated, is the following: any design of a system, be it electronic, mechanical, computational or of some other nature, requires a language. The language as such is purely a social medium, i.e. it serves human understanding, although it holds no value with regards to the end product. Just think about it for a moment: you don't sit to think about the state of any particular transistor while you're using your computer -- in fact, you don't know anything about *any* particular transistor. The same holds with computer programs: the nature of the machine code itself can be completely opaque and the program is still going to work -- which incidentally is also what makes the whole discussion of "&lt;a href="http://thetarpit.org/2023/open-source" rel="nofollow"&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt;" moot.

Now, from this follows that the "proper" language used to describe a system is only incidental to the technical aspects of said system, and say, its power of expression, is in fact for the most part a function of the culture it inhabits. That is why, say, Rust is a "good" language; not because its compiler-enforced correctness is a necessary feature of programming languages -- programming languages work fine without such features; but because that's how you get a dumb AI to write correct computer programs. And yes, I know that Rust was designed before LLMs were a thing; Haskell was designed before Rust was a thing; and higher-order logics were conceived before Haskell was a thing; and what of that? The point is: when you over-rely on mechanical means to design systems, the mechanical means will become a sunken cost, so soon enough you'll have no other means to do such things.</description>
		<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Let the note remain here that Dijkstra's concern is a legitimate one even today, although it goes beyond the realm of mere "goto statements".</p>
<p>The problem, restated, is the following: any design of a system, be it electronic, mechanical, computational or of some other nature, requires a language. The language as such is purely a social medium, i.e. it serves human understanding, although it holds no value with regards to the end product. Just think about it for a moment: you don't sit to think about the state of any particular transistor while you're using your computer -- in fact, you don't know anything about *any* particular transistor. The same holds with computer programs: the nature of the machine code itself can be completely opaque and the program is still going to work -- which incidentally is also what makes the whole discussion of "<a href="http://thetarpit.org/2023/open-source" rel="nofollow">open source</a>" moot.</p>
<p>Now, from this follows that the "proper" language used to describe a system is only incidental to the technical aspects of said system, and say, its power of expression, is in fact for the most part a function of the culture it inhabits. That is why, say, Rust is a "good" language; not because its compiler-enforced correctness is a necessary feature of programming languages -- programming languages work fine without such features; but because that's how you get a dumb AI to write correct computer programs. And yes, I know that Rust was designed before LLMs were a thing; Haskell was designed before Rust was a thing; and higher-order logics were conceived before Haskell was a thing; and what of that? The point is: when you over-rely on mechanical means to design systems, the mechanical means will become a sunken cost, so soon enough you'll have no other means to do such things.</p>
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