> > everyone knows goto was bad.

> Absolutely hard disagree. You can write extremely clean and resilient C with C89, goto, and a handful of rules.

That's a different goto. The one in C89 can only jump around within functions, but the article is talking about goto that can jump between any two points in the whole codebase arbitrarily. It stresses that point a bit more later on in the article, but you can already see it from the FLOW-MATIC code quoted above (which doesn't even have functions).

Your point actually still stands: it's theoretically possible to write clean code using even the more general goto. (Probably by building abstractions with it like "function" and "for loop".) But would you be happy doing that with someone else - or especially with a coding agent? It's better that the "handful of rules" are enforced by the language, in my opinion.

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Edit:

> That's also exactly what Dijkstra was arguing, if you read past the much misquoted "goto considered harmful", which he never said

I just re-read the original "GOTO considered harmful" article (it's short and clear) and, while the title might not have been his, Dijkstra was definitely making a very plain argument that goto is bad for everyone and should be scrapped. He says in the introduction:

> I [have] become convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code).

And in the conclusion:

> The go to statement as it stands is just too primitive; it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one's program.