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.
A common case is a function that uses resources like opening files, sockets, whatever. If there’s an error you want to ensure a clean exit, so at different parts of said function you
gotothe end where you check if said resources are being used and release them before exiting.Cleaner than constantly checking at every error.