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Beautiful Code Interview
An anonymous reader writes "Safari Books Online has just posted an interview with Andy Oram and Greg Wilson, the two editors who put together the recent O'Reilly book, Beautiful Code. "Beautiful Code" features 33 different case studies about challenging coding scenarios from some of today's most high-profile developers and OS project leaders. There's also a new Beautiful Code web site based on the book where many of the authors are blogging about their work and coding practices."
Any crap programmer can write spaghetti code with or without the use of 'goto'.
If goto were not useful or necessary then languages would have dropped it years ago when CS profs started to dread it because they couldn't teach their students properly and got tired of spitting out idiot programmer after idiot programmer who tortured them with goto-ridden spaghetti code.
Telling people to NEVER use goto is like saying "never use a chainsaw because if you attempt to cut down a weed you'll just end up with a big mess". So what, we use a hand saw to cut down an oak tree ? There are far more elegant solutions for a lot of things that can be accomplished with goto. Conversely, there are occasions where goto makes for a more elegant solution.
At the very least, as you put it "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Using your own philosphy I opt for giving programmers all of the necessary tools that they may find useful, and deciding for themselves which ones to use. After all, there are some programmers out there who could write code that is 100 x more efficient and elegant using ONLY gotos in C with main as the only function than I ever could using goto-free, well designed and thought-out object oriented Java, for example.
No matter what you do, the end result will always be the same anyway. Exceptional programmers will continue to produce exceptional code and pasta chefs will continue to produce spaghetti.