Call/cc Considered Harmful
I just spent two days studying call-with-current-continuation.
I scratched my head trying to figure out what sort of execution-flow magic was going on, trying to see what made this one of the most powerful features of scheme. I spent hours trying to decipher the scheme jargon and heady compsci technobabble.
Today someone explained that I was reading too much into things, that it's really quite simple. A short tutorial reading later and the light bulb went on:
call/cc is just GOTO
The scheme community is so caught up in their own self-important pontifications and pedagogy that they can't just admit that one of the most powerful features in their belovedly pure language is just GOTO.
I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor.
In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.
—Edsger W. Dijkstra