Structured Programming Paradigm

There was a time when computer programs were so long and unstructured that only a few people could logically navigate the source code of huge software projects. With low-level programming languages, programmers used various equivalents of "goto" statements for conditional branching, which often resulted in decreased readability and difficulty maintaining logical context, especially when jumping too far into another subroutine.

A few things happened on the way to a solution that eventually appeared in the form of the Structured Programming Paradigm. In 1966, Corrado Böhm and Guiseppe Jacopini proved a theorem that any computer program that can be represented as a flowchart can be rewritten using only 3 control structures (sequence, selection, and iteration).

In 1968, Edsger W. Dijkstra published the influential article "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", in which he pointed out that using too many goto statements would make computer programs harder to read and understand. However, his intention was unfortunately misunderstood and misused by the almost complete abandonment of the use of "goto" in high-level programming languages, even at the cost of less readable and vague code.

As a result of his work on improving ALGOL, Niklaus Wirth designed a new imperative programming language, Pascal, which was released in 1970. It has been widely used for teaching structured programming design to students for several decades since.