It was years ago that I worked at that company. Unfortunately, things like refactoring weren't very big there, and the other developers - who were, I should emp

It was years ago that I worked at that company. Unfortunately, things like refactoring weren't very big there, and the other developers - who were, I should emphasize, really nice guys! - were not exactly open to change. When I was hired there, that application had been in development for ~15 years, and a lot of what I did was maintenance. So making coming in as the new guy, then starting to change things, I had to tread rather carefully. FWIW, I got each of the three developers to individually admit to me that if we had the time and the money, we would basically throw the old code out and rewrite it from scratch, using the lessons they had learnt since. But time and money being what they were, that was not likely to happen. (I was really proud I got them to admit that, though - one of the other developers was very defensive of his work, and getting him to admit that was quite an achievement; I actually gained some valuable people skills in doing so.) I was glad, though, that the code was relatively readable and organized in a sane manner. There was some cruft that had accumulated over the years, but overall it was surprisingly sane. That was one of the first times I had to read somebody else's code, and it was good code for that purpose - sparsely commented, yet very clear. Also, keep in mind that this was C. Different languages offer different ways of decomposing / structuring code.