What is the Pasta Theory of Programming?
The Pasta Theory is a common analogy for application development that describes different programming structures as popular pasta dishes. These analogies include spaghetti, lasagna, and ravioli code.
Spaghetti code
Spaghetti code is a phrase used for unstructured and difficult-to-maintain source code. Like a spaghetti, the flow of code is tangled and it’s hard to figure out the relation between different pieces of code. For example, code that includes a lot of GOTO statements instead of structured programming constructs is spaghetti code – the resulting code is convoluted and difficult to understand.
Lasagna code
Lasagna code is used to describe code that is structured, understandable, and layered. Lasagna code, although structured, is monolithic and difficult to modify. The layers are so complicated and intertwined that making a change in one layer may necessitate changes in all other layers. An example of this type of code is an object-oriented code with a lot of small classes and several unpredictable interdependencies between them.
Ravioli code
Ravioli code is the ideal structure for your software. It is specific to object-oriented programming and refers to code that are comprises of well-structured classes that are easy to understand in isolation. In ravioli code, each of the components, or objects, are self-contained; so, any component can be modified or replaced without significantly affecting other components.
There is also macaroni code – code that uses a mixture of computer languages in a single document – and pizza code – code with a flat architecture. However, these terms are rarely used in practice.
RELATED TAGS
