A twenty year retrospective of the NATO software engineering conferences (panel session): remembrances of a graduate student

Elsewhere in 1968, Dijkstra published the goto letter, we got our first copies of Knuth’s Volume 1, and we were just catching on that Floyd was serious about making formal assertions about programs. We argued strenuously about whether the goto disciplines were too restrictive: why shouldn’t we use gotos? Avoiding them makes programs look contorted. We loved Knuth: here were the tricks of the trade, all collected in one place, discussed, compared, analyzed. We were fascinated by the possibility that you could Hnour the outcome of a running a program, rather than just believing (or, more likely, hoping).