Honestly, the exact example they criticise is a common device I use to make code less complex. Yes, you can horribly mis-use it, and you can horribly mis-use goto, but I don't want someone to tell me I can't use something just because I might not use it properly. There's an interesting discussion on goto's use in the Linux kernel here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131 (the final example, stack-style rewind, is NOT pretty in Java).