MM: technology and life thoughts

Several years ago E.W.Dijkstra popularized the GOTO, an old technique to jump to a program specific part from wherever you want.

A brief introduction to the GOTO (thanks to wikipedia):

GOTO is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It is a combination of the English words go and to. When executed it causes an unconditional transfer of control (a “jump”) to another statement. The jumped-to statement is specified using some kind of label, which may be an identifier or a line number depending on the language. At the machine code level a goto is a form of branch or jump statement.

I think GOTO is a low-level programming language thing, from some point of view I can think that our core developers are thinking in put more powerful tools to the PHP programming language (maybe for performance tasks).

I don’t really know, the only thing I can say is that the GOTO feature might allow more disordered code; I’ve been dealing with a lot of bad coding practices that programmers have been adopted; all of that thanks to PHP’s flexibility.

Timothy Boronczyk thinks that the introduction of GOTO will be harmful to most web developers:

GOTO is no different than an if or switch statement. The absolute beginner has more trouble wrapping his mind around while-loops because suddenly there’s a conditional and variable states to keep track of, or understanding PHP’s internal typecasting rules.

GOTO will affect those who let themselves be affected by GOTO. I don’t mean that to sound like a non-answer… but some will work themselves up into frenzy and use it as fodder to bash PHP, others will take the approach I did and explore whether they can make use of a new language feature, and the rest will probably just ignore it. GOTO is simply another option PHP makes available to the programmer, just like functions, objects, variable-variables, and so on. It’s up to the programmer to know which constructs are suitable for the task at hand.

Maybe the PHP developers (I mean core developers) are thinking in an easier language for kids (PHP distribution with colored wax and a little blackboard). Or they are really going to demonstrate that a GOTO feature will be very useful for some purposes and a good thing for PHP’s future.

So, what do you think?

xkcd has its own point of view: