The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.

We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.

Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about the go to statement. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!