Read David Tribble's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful: A Retrospective" instead: http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html . It contains the entire text of Dijkstra's paper and goes over its meaning in a modern context on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. It's very well written and makes clear the "encourages spaghetti code" argument, while true at the time, applied in a era where basic control flow constructs that we now take for granted did not exist in commonly used languages.