Well, even today it's not entirely useless as a mantra: I have seen a lot of "hardware" and "signals" people in university who when they first had to do something in C or C++ used goto instead of loops and if blocks, coming from an assembler mindset probably where you have to (conditionally) jump (aka goto) around. I had people come to me and ask me "how do you do goto in java" in a java class where I was kinda a TA-A. "Goto considered harmful* (*most of the time, in higher level languages)" still served as a good enough rule of thumb.