Being pressured to GOTO the dark-side

Question

We have a situation at work where developers working on a legacy (core) system are being pressured into using GOTO statements when adding new features into existing code that is already infected with spaghetti code.

Now, I understand there may be arguments for using 'just one little GOTO' instead of spending the time on refactoring to a more maintainable solution. The issue is, this isolated 'just one little GOTO' isn't so isolated. At least once every week or so there is a new 'one little GOTO' to add. This codebase is already a horror to work with due to code dating back to or before 1984 being riddled with GOTOs that would make many Pastafarians believe it was inspired by the Flying Spaghetti Monster itself.

Unfortunately the language this is written in doesn't have any ready made refactoring tools, so it makes it harder to push the 'Refactor to increase productivity later' because short-term wins are the only wins paid attention to here...

Has anyone else experienced this issue whereby everybody agrees that we cannot be adding new GOTOs to jump 2000 lines to a random section, but continually have Anaylsts insist on doing it just this one time and having management approve it?

tldr;

How can one go about addressing the issue of developers being pressured (forced) to continually add GOTO statements (by add, I mean add to jump to random sections many lines away) because it 'gets that feature in quicker'?

I'm beginning to fear we may lose valuable developers to the raptors over this...

Clarification:

Goto here

alsoThere: No, I'm talking about the kind of goto that jumps 1000 lines out of one subroutine into another one mid way into a while loop. Goto somewhereClose

there: I wasn't even talking about the kind of gotos you can reasonably read over and determine what a program was doing. Goto alsoThere

somewhereClose: This is the sort of code that makes meatballs midpoint: If first time here Goto nextpoint detail:(each one almost completely different) Goto pointlessReturn

here: In this question, I was not talking about the occasionally okay use of a goto. Goto there

tacoBell: and it has just gone back to the drawing board. Goto Jail

elsewhere: When it takes Analysts weeks to decypher what a program is doing each time it is touched, something is deeply wrong with your codebase. In fact, I'm actually up to my hell:if not up-to-date goto 4 rendition of the spec goto detail pointlessReturn: goto tacoBell

Jail: Actually, just a small update with a small victory. I spent 4 hours refactoring a portion of this particular program a single label at a time, saving each iteration in svn as I went. Each step (about 20 of them) was smallish, logical and easy enough to goto bypass nextpoint: spontaneously jump out of your meal and onto you screen through some weird sort of spaghetti-meatball magnetism. Goto elseWhere bypass: reasonably verify that it should not introduce any logic changes. Using this new more readable version, I've sat down with the analyst and completed almost all of this change now. Goto end

4: first *if first time here goto hell, no second if first time here goto hell, no third if first time here goto hell fourth now up-to-date goto hell

end:

Answer 1

How many bugs have been introduced because of incorrectly written GOTOs? How much money did they cost the company? Turn the issue into something concrete, rather than "this feels bad". Once you can get it recognized as a problem by the people in charge, turn it into a policy like, "no new GOTOs for anything except simplifying the exit logic for a function", or "no new GOTOs for any functions that don't have 100% unit test coverage". Over time, tighten the policies.

Answer 2

GOTOs don't make good code spaghetti, there are a multitude of other factors involved. This linux mailing list discussion can help put a few things into perspective (comments from Linus Torvalds about the bigger picture of using gotos).

Trying to institute a "no goto policy" just for the sake of not having gotos will not achive anything in the long run, and will not make your code more maintainable. The changes will need to be more subtle and focus on increasing the overall quality of the code, think along the lines of using best practices for the platform/language, unit test coverage, static analysis etc.

Answer 3

I recently had to work on some code that wasn't legacy per se, but the former developers' habits certainly were and thus GOTO's were everywhere. I don't like GOTO's; they make a hideous mess of things and make debugging a nightmare. Worse yet, replacing them with normal code is not always straightforward.

IF you can't unwind your GOTO's I certainly recommend that you no longer use them.

Answer 4

The reality of development is that despite all the flowery words about doing it the right way, most clients are more interested in doing it the fast way. The concept of a code base rapidly moving towards the point of imploding and the resulting fallout on their business is something that they cannot comprehend because that would mean having to think beyond today.

What you have is just one example. How you stand on this will dictate how you do development in the future. I think you have 4 options:

1. Accept the request and accept that you will always be doing this.

2. Accept the request, and immediately start looking for a new job.

3. Refuse to do and and be prepared to fight to fix the mess.

4. Resign.

Which option you choose is going to depend on how much you value your job and your self esteem.

Answer 5

If a change to the program requires "just one little goto" I would say that the code was very maintainable.

This is a common problem when dealing with legacy code. Stick to the style the program was originally written in or "modernize" the code. For me the answer is usually to stick with the original style unless you have a really big change that would justify a complete re-write.

Also be aware that several "modern" language features like java's "throw" statement, or SQLs "ON ERROR" are really "GO TO"s in disguise.

Answer 6

Back to principles:

• Is it readable?
• Does it work?
• Is it maintainable?

Answer 7

This is the classic "management" vs. "techies" conflict.

In spite of being on the "techie" team, over the years I have settled firmly the "management" side of this debate.

There are a number of reasons for this:

1. It's quite possible to have well written easy to read properly structured programs with gotos! Ask any assembler programmer; conditional branch and a primitive do loop are all they have to work with. Just because the "style" is not current and doesn't mean its not well written.

2. If it is a mess then its going to be a real pain to extract the busines rules you will need if you are going for a complete re-write, or, if you are doing a technical refactoring of the program you will never be sure the behaviour of the refactored program is "correct" i.e. it does exactly what the old program does.

3. Return on investment -- sticking to the original programming style and making minimal changes will take minimum effort and quickly statisfy the customers request. Spending a lot of time and effort refactoring will be more expensive and take longer.

4. Risk -- rewrites and refactoring are hard to get right, extensive testing of the refactored code is required and things that look like "bugs" may have been "features" as far as the customer is concerned. A particular problem with "improving" legacy code is that business users may have well established work arounds that depend on a bug being there, or, exploit the existense of a bugs to change the business procedures without informing the IT department.

So all in all management is faced with a decision -- "add one little goto" test the change and get it into production in double quick time with little risk -- or -- go in for a major programming effort and have the business scream at them when a new set of bugs crops up.

And if you do decide to refactor in five years time some snotty nosed college graduate will be moaning that your refactored program is not buzzword compliant any more and demanding he be allowed to spend weeks rewriting it.

If it ain't broke dont fix it!

PS: Even Joel thinks this is a bad idea: things you should never do

Update!-

OK if you want to refactor and improve the code you need to go about it properly.

The basic problem is you are saying to the client is "I want to spend n weeks working on this program and, if everything goes well, it will do exactly what it does now." -- this is a hard sell to say the least.

You need to gather long term data on the number of crashes and outages, the time spent analysing and programming seemingly small changes, the number of change requests that were not done because they were too hard, business opertunities lost because the system could not change fast enough. Also gather some acedemic data on the costs of maintaing well structured programs vs. letting it sink.

Unless you have a watertight case to present to the beancounters you will not get the budget. You really have to sell this to the business management, not, your immediate bosses.

Answer 8

Maybe you can use the boyscout-pattern: Leave the place a little more clean than you found it. So for every featurerequest: don't introduce new gotos, but remove one.

This won't spend too much time for improvements, would give more time, to find newly introduced bugs. Maybe it wouldn't cost much additional time, if you remove a goto from the part, which although had to spend time understanding, and bringing the new feature in.

Argue, that a refactoring of 2 hours will save 20 times 15 minutes in the future, and allow faster and deeper improvements.

Answer 9

Unfortunately the language this is written in doesn't have any ready made refactoring tools

Don't you have editors with macro capabilities? Don't you have shell scripts? I've done tons of refactoring over the years, very little of it with refactoring browsers.

Answer 10

The underlying problem here seems to be that you have 'analysts' who describe, presumably necessary, functional changes in terms of adding a goto to some code. And then you have 'programmers' whose job appears to be limited to typing in that change and then complaining about it.

To make anything different, that dysfunctional allocation of responsibilities between those people needs to change. There are a lot of different ways to split up the work: The classic, conventional one (that is quite likely the official, but ignored, policy in your work) is to have analysts write a implementation-independent specification document and programmers implement it as maintainably as they can.

The problem with that theoretical approach is it is actually unworkably unrealistic in many common situations. In particular, doing it 'properly' requires employees seen as junior to win an argument with colleagues who are more senior, have better social connections in the office, and more business-savvy. If the argument 'goto is not implementation-independent, so as an analyst you simply can't say that word' doesn't fly at your workspace, then presumably this is the case.

Far better in many circumstances are alternatives like:

1. analysts write client-facing code and developers write infrastructure.
2. Analysts write executable specifications which are used as reference implementations for unit tests.
3. Developers create a domain specific language in which analysts program.
4. You drop he distinction between one and the other, having only a hybrid.