That same generation of programmers also moved us out of the GOTO hell that they existed in with more reasonable structured languages. There&#x27;s a reason, and it&#x27;s not just coincidence, that old school Fortran and BASIC and assembler written in an unstructured manner is difficult to maintain and reason about, while software written in more structured language is easier to maintain and reason about.<p>This is what Dijkstra was commenting about. It&#x27;s related to his &quot;Go to statement considered harmful&quot; (1968) paper and his text (with Hoare and Dahl) <i>Structured Programming</i> (1972).<p>EDIT: I was looking for something like this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dartmouth_BASIC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dartmouth_BASIC</a><p><pre><code>  Version 6 saw the introduction of separately compilable
  procedures with parameters. In 1976, Steve Garland added
  structured programming features to create Dartmouth SBASIC,
  a precompiler which produced version 6 output (and which
  formed the basis of ANSI BASIC).
</code></pre>
Structured programming was introduced into at least this version of BASIC <i>after</i> Dijkstra&#x27;s statement about BASIC causing brain damage.