Legacy code can’t help but suck

Pet peeve: calling legacy code garbage just because it was written in the past.

Of course code written years ago looks crappy if you view it through the frame of the current standards. Even the most pristine legacy code will suck by that unfair comparison.

Best practices change. Standard dependencies become old school. Linters and quality checks get added. Newer language versions add syntactic sugar. None of that is the legacy code’s fault.

And of course sometimes legacy code really is flat out garbage. But that’s just because it’s code, not because it’s legacy.