In this letter, Dijkstra talks about readability and maintainability in a time where those topics were rarely talked about (1968). This letter was one of the main causes why modern programmers don’t have to trouble themselves with goto statements. Older languages like Java and C# still have a (discouraged) goto statement, because they (mindlessly) copied it from C, which (mindlessly) copied it from Assembly, but more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin don’t even have a goto statement anymore.

  • Kissaki@programming.dev
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    6 months ago

    PDF magic… It has grainy text. But the selectable text and displayed text have a 1-character offset.

    I assume they display the original scan so it definitely does not contain errors, while still providing the image-parsed text for searchability, indexability, and select-+copyability?

    screenshot of text + backing text offset

    Unfortunately, the grainy text is hard[er] to read.