[terryk88a]

comments here that allude to the history of spaghetti code are actually a bit off topic with respect to the article, but the early fortran family (pointedly - F66) had severly limited control structures in the language: a very weak for loop, and the goto statement.

'while' and 'until' showed up in RATFOR (rational fortran) which fits into the lexical ancestry of 'C'. I think that the Algol family had these too.

without the more powerful control statements, GOTO was heavily used, and with wild abandon. Some variants even let you GOTO up and down the execution stack.

trying to trace logic (of course there weren't symbolic debuggers way back when) could be like following a strand of spaghetti.

my most (not) favorite modern examples are coroutines, but let's not forget the evergreen example of enterprise java wherein one can easily achieve stack depths that boggle the mind.

nevertheless, spaghetti code is a frame of mind in which the untutored implement minimally functional software systems that only work for trivial conditions and for which the source code itself can not be reverse engineered except with great magic, epic heroism and extraordinary luck on the attack roll.