I came across a version of Dijkstra’s “Goto Considered Harmful” annotated by David Tribble. A lot has changed since then; the annotated version is perfect for acquiring the right context to read the paper.

There was a particular line by the annotator that continues to amuse me:

Dijkstra seems to imply that iterative looping (inductive) statements are intellectually harder to grasp than recursion, which is the kind of thing only a mathematician would say.

Among the ways you can bisect computer science, is whether this statement insults or compliments.