"Primarily, spaghetti code is a literary failing. Through my observations of the developers responsible for these wrecks — they often turned out to be poor prose writers and some were very arrogant about their coding abilities. I believe the core skill that these cowboys lack is that of editing – an instinctive drive towards pruning and tweaking that all good writers know is one of the most important components of literary creation." Some good stuff in here, especially around technical literacy (and, by extension, literate programming).