Here’s a pattern I’d like to be able to talk about. It might be known under a certain name somewhere, but if it is, I don’t know it. I call it a Spaghetti Tower. It shows up in large complex systems that are built haphazardly.

Someone or something builds the first Part A.

Later, someone wants to put a second Part B on top of Part A, either out of convenience (a common function, just somewhere to put it) or as a refinement to Part A.

Now, suppose you want to tweak Part A. If you do that, you might break Part B, since it interacts with bits of Part A. So you might instead build Part C on top of the previous ones.

And by the time your system looks like this, it’s much harder to tell what changes you can make to an earlier part without crashing some component, so you’re basically relegated to throwing another part on top of the pile.

I call these spaghetti towers for two reasons: One, because they tend to quickly take on circuitous knotty tangled structures, like what programmers call “spaghetti code”. (Part of the problem with spaghetti code is that it can lead to spaghetti towers.)

Especially since they’re usually interwoven in multiple dimensions, and thus look more like this:

“Can you just straighten out the yellow one without touching any of the others? Thanks.”

Second, because shortsightedness in the design process is a crucial part of spaghetti machines. In order to design a spaghetti system, you throw spaghetti against a wall and see if it sticks. Then, when you want to add another part, you throw more spaghetti until it sticks to that spaghetti. And later, you throw more spaghetti. So it goes. And if you decide that you want to tweak the bottom layer to make it a little more useful – which you might want to do because, say, it was built out of spaghetti – without damaging the next layers of gummy partially-dried spaghetti, well then, good luck.

Note that all systems have load-bearing, structural pieces. This does not make them spaghetti towers. The distinction about spaghetti towers is that they have a lot of shoddily-built structural components that are completely unintentional. A bridge has major load-bearing components – they’re pretty obvious, strong, elegant, and efficiently support the rest of the structure. A spaghetti tower is more like this.

Image from the always-delightful r/DiWHY.

(The motto of the spaghetti tower is “Sure, it works fine, as long as you...

Anto Pinjatić

Anto Pinjatić