Old Coding Styles – Is It Normal for Programmers to Use Old Coding Styles?

coding-style

I have my first real job as programmer, but I can't solve any problems because of the coding style used. The code here:

  • Does not have comments
  • Does not have functions (50, 100, 200, 300 or more lines executed in sequence)
  • Uses a lot of if statements with a lot of paths
  • Has variables that make no sense (eg.: cf_cfop, CF_Natop, lnom, r_procod)
  • Uses an old language (Visual FoxPro 8 from 2002), but there are new releases from 2007.

I feel like I have gone back to 1970. Is it normal for a programmer familiar with OOP, clean-code, design patterns, etc. to have trouble with coding in this old-fashion way?

EDIT: All the answers are very good. For my (un)hope, appears that there are a lot of this kind of code base around the world. A point mentioned to all answers is refactor the code. Yeah, I really like to do it. In my personal project, I always do this, but… I can't refactor the code. Programmers are only allowed to change the files in the task that they are designed for.

Every change in old code must be keep commented in the code (even with Subversion as version control), plus meta information (date, programmer, task) related to that change (this became a mess, there is code with 3 used lines and 50 old lines commented). I'm thinking that is not only a code problem, but a management of software development problem.

Best Answer

Ok, I'll be blunt. That is a bad place to work... I've been in such situations, and usually it ends with you being swallowed by this code. After a year or so, you'll get used to it, and you'll loose the grip on how modern alternatives can be used to achieve the same task easier, in a more maintainable way, and also, faster at run-time in most cases.

I left a workplace like that, because, after just a month, I felt I'm being dragged into an old skool code. I tried to give it a go, but decided not to. I couldn't use clean code and started to loose skills because of missing everyday practice. Any modern approach had to be approved by 3 layers of developers, which never happened, because the idea was that things might break when modern approaches are used. And fragile nature of the code that comes out when you don't use modern approaches is quite scary.

Don't get me wrong, there are cases where people over-engineer solutions, and I'm all against it. But being dragged into '80 coding conventions and style for extensive amount of time will stop your progress, and also, I think, career opportunities.

Then again, you have to earn money, so sometimes you have to do what you don't exactly like. Keep an eye on burnout symptoms and turning coding into a mundane task in those cases though.

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