What’s the Next GOTO?

In 1968, the infamously grumpy computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra published a polemic called “<a href="http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html">Go To Statement Considered Harmful</a>” in which he made a striking argument: GOTO, a programming language feature widely considered essential at the time, was such a bad idea that not only should programmers stop using it, but it should be <i>removed from high-level languages altogether</i>. A decades-long fight ensued, but Dijkstra essentially won the day: new languages now rarely support GOTO, and even when they do, programmers largely pretend they don’t. The idea that <i>removing</i> features can make programming languages <i>better</i> is both surprising and exciting. <b>What programming language features that we consider essential today might be the next GOTO</b>, withering and vanishing from high-level languages of the future? In this talk, we’ll look at several candidates: raw memory access, inheritance, reference types, and null. Drawing on examples from several programming languages, we’ll look at some of the problems with these features, the alternatives, and the tradeoffs. This talk will be accessible to <b>anyone with beginning programming experience</b>. It will have some tasty tidbits for hard-core programming language nerds, but if you have some idea what variables, loops, and objects are, then you’ll be fine! And if you don’t, you can still show up for the puns.