Spaghetti in the Cloud

Will cloud computing eliminate spaghetti code? The question is a good one, and the answer is unclear.

First, let's understand the term "spaghetti code". It is a term that dates back to the 1970s according to Wikipedia and was probably an argument for structured programming techniques. Unstructured programming was harder to read and understand, and the term introduced an analogy of messy code.

Spaghetti code was bad. It was hard to understand. It was fragile, and small changes led to unexpected failures. Structured programming was, well, structured and therefore (theoretically) spaghetti programming could not occur under the discipline of structured programming.

But theory didn't work quite right, and even with the benefits of structured programming, we found that we had code that was difficult to maintain. (In other words, spaghetti code.)

After structured programming, object-oriented programming was the solution. Object-oriented programming, with its ability to group data and functions into classes, was going to solve the problems of spaghetti code.

Like structured programming before it, object-oriented programming didn't make all code easy to read and modify.

Which brings us to cloud computing. Will cloud computing suffer from "spaghetti code"? Will we have difficult to read and difficult to maintain systems in the cloud?

The obvious answer is "yes". Companies and individuals who transfer existing (difficult to read) systems into the cloud will have ... difficult-to-understand code in the cloud.

The more subtle answer is... "yes".

The problems of difficult-to-read code is not the programming style (unstructured, structured, or object-oriented) but in mutable state. "State" is the combination of values for all variables and changeable entities in a program. For a program with mutable state, these variables change over time. For one to read and understand the code, one must understand the current state, that is, the current value of all of those values. But to know the current value of those variables, one must understand all of the operations that led to the current state, and that list can be daunting.

The advocates of functional programming (another programming technique) doesn't allow for mutable variables. Variables are fixed and unchanging. Once created, they exist and retain their value forever.

With cloud computing, programs (and variables) do not hold state. Instead, state is stored in databases, and programs run "stateless". Programs are simpler too, with a cloud system using smaller programs linked together with databases and message queues.

But that doesn't prevent people from moving large, complicated programs into the cloud. It doesn't prevent people from writing large, complicated programs in the cloud. Some programs in the cloud will be small and easy to read. Others will be large and hard to understand.

So, will spaghetti code exist in the cloud? Yes. But perhaps not as much as in previous technologies.