Go To Statement Considered Harmful

One page that changed how software is written. Dijkstra argued that unstructured jumps make programs impossible to reason about — and that the quality of a programmer's thinking is bounded by the control structures available. The paper launched structured programming and established the principle that intellectual manageability is the primary constraint on software quality. For product people: the earliest and most elegant example of the principle that constraints enable rather than limit creative work. Every time a team adopts a convention that restricts freedom in order to gain clarity, they are applying Dijkstra's insight.