Keith Ray links to a 1989 video of a presentation by Dan Ingalls on Smalltalk - back when he was an Apple employee. The comment below hits on one of the classic issues in procedural programming: the switch statement. Sure, they can be useful. Smalltalk simply provides a better answer: polymorphism.

Dan Ingalls , principle designer of Smalltalk, with Alan Kay at Xerox Parc. This video was sponsored by Apple, recorded in 1989. In introducing OO (and Smalltalk in particular), he describes the main failing of non-object oriented languages in writing complex software: the switch statement. The switch statement has all sorts of problems with cohesion and coupling. The irony today is that almost all OO languages today, other than Python and Smalltalk (in which it can easily be implemented), still have switch statements.