As a computer science student of the 70s Edsger Wybe Dijkstra 1930 - 2002 had a major influence on the faculty and, by extension, me. It was saddened to hear of his death on Tuesday. I remember reading Dijkstra's seminal Go To Statement Considered Harmful as part of my studies. Here's the opening paragraph:

For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to this discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so.