rat's nest

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rat's nest (plural rat's nests)

1. (idiomatic) Something that is excessively complicated, entangled, or disorderly.
   • 1990 May 22, Bernard Holland, "Opera: A 17th-Century Rarity, Cesti's 'Dori'," New York Times (retrieved 2 March 2017):

     To make this mid-17th-century rat's nest of love affairs and sexual confusions intelligible for late-20th-century audiences is a job in itself.

   • 2003 Nov. 1, Charles Arthur, "This is the sound of the future," Independent (UK) (retrieved 2 March 2017):

     That has been held up by the need to negotiate the distribution rights for each country with the labels and artists—a rat's nest of contracts.

   • 2015 August 26, "Editorial: Why can't college athletes unionize?," Los Angeles Times (retrieved 2 March 2017):

     Faced with that rat's nest of legal and jurisdictional issues, the NLRB threw the Northwestern players' labor rights under the team bus.

2. (idiomatic, computing, often hyphenated when used attributively) A software or hardware system whose design lacks organized structure, making it difficult to understand and maintain.
   • 2002 Jan. 14, Jim Turley, "Embedded Processors, Part Two," PC Magazine (retrieved 2 March 2017):

     Many CPU silicon designers in the 1990s complained bitterly about the rat's nest in the center of SPARC chips.

   • 2008 July 21, Larry Dignan, "Amazon's S3 outage: Is the cloud too complicated?," ZDNet (retrieved 2 March 2017):

     And cloud computing relies on millions of connections and services. In other words, it's a troubleshooting nightmare when the cloud goes bust. . . . In other words, the cloud will likely become more of a rat's nest.

   • 2016 July 2, veryatlantic, "Saturday, July 2, 2016: Addendum," Tales From The Trailer Court™ (retrieved 2 March 2017):

     Think of libraries as the way the sub-idiots who like C code hide all the rat's-nest programming they don't want you to see.

• hornets' nest
• mare's nest
• spaghetti code

• tartness