I remember when "structured programming" was the new silver bullet all the guru's were talking about. This must have been the late 70's or early 80's. I was programming in DEC Basic-Plus on the RSTS/E operating system on a PDP-11. All variables were global, as I recall. We had subroutines and user defined functions with arguments but no local variable scope. We had if-then-else, but I think only a single statement was allowed for the "then" branch, so the cleanest way was often "if condition then gosub 1000 else gosub 2000" or something like that. A lot of the legacy code I had to work with was classic spaghetti-code with goto for flow control. Oh, I think we had only single-character variable names. Those were the days.

But I worked out how to adopt the new structured style to the limitations of the language, and learned a lot. Better languages make better tools, of course, but it's the hacker's attitude that really matters.