There's a million of articles explaining why one should not write the
Spaghetti code, however software implementations with all kinds of rotten Spaghetti are really numerous, the
function spaghetti code in particular.
What is the difference of function spaghetti code from usual spaghetti code? Whereas a classic spaghetti code consists of a combination of goto, conditions, if-clauses and so on; the function spaghetti kind of code usually consists of single source file filled with all possible kinds of functions which do absolutely anything. The source file of 4000 (four thousands) lines is kind of a norm in the software development industry nowadays, I personally seen source files with more than 15000 (fifteen thousands lines of code).
It is very common for JavaScript, not because the language is particularly bad, just because a lot of development is done with JavaScript, and it's often done not by best developers. Nevertheless, the Java classes with hundreds of methods, python files with heaps of functions irrelevant to each other, the PHP files doing everything are also quite common.
There's absolutely no excuse to keep these giants on the back-end, so back-enders simply make a sad face and admit that they write bad code. JS developers are often more persistent in protecting their noodles, and have many excuses to dig these enormously deep function draw-wells, some excuses them are:
- We don't want many separate JavaScript files because single one loads faster;
- We don't want another build tool which would transpile our JavaScript into single or a few build files;
- We don't want to use NPM;
- Our company proxy blocking NPM downloads;
- These are just a tiny little functions, all irrelevant to each others, let's keep 'em in one place;
- We don't know how to write proper JS.
All these excuses are just rubbish, if you are capable to install packages with NPM this problem is easily solved with such things as Rollup, Webpack, Babel and Browserify.
If use of NPM is for some mysterious reason is absolutely impossible, these functions anyway can be somehow grouped by the subject and split into a few files, those could be fed to the browser as they are, or can be simply concatenated into one file with any kind of build tool.
