For starters I am by no means an expert in programming. I know enough to be dangerous, and to serve my own personal projects.
A while back a programmer friend of mine was guiding me in programming. Back then I wrote some C code, and in a error handling routine, I used the dreaded GOTO statement.
Boy did this unleash his complete wrath. He could talk about nothing else afterwards.
I was berated, screamed at, told I will never be a good programmer. I should give up now. GOTO's are the tools of a lazy ignorant and bad programmers. I am the worst programmer ever.. On and On. Any programmer that uses GOTO is a bad bad lazy programmer.
I then grepped through Linux kernel sources, and showed him that I found over 200 uses of GOTO's.
He of course said they are not real programmers and they are just hacks, are lazy and stupid..... On and On...
So out of curiosity about the OpenSSL bug the other day, I looked at the sources, and low and behold, GOTO's everywhere.
I was shocked. Was this very important software written by hacks? Lazy, bad programmers? No wonder the serious security flaw..
Is GOTO the gold standard of a bad lazy programmer?
So I must ask you guys.. What's the deal?
(needless to say I don't use them anymore :) )