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>I think their impact on code history is negligible in the case of every legacy system I've worked on. The code history just isn't there.

Not sure if I agree here or not - whilst yes, the history isn't there, if it's a small enough team you'll have a good guess at who wrote it.

Definitely found I've learnt the style of colleages so know who to ask just from the code outline.

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Legacy systems that you inherit don't have people coming with them very often. That's part of the context of this. You often don't have people to trace it back to or at least not the people who actually wrote it (maybe someone who worked with them before they got laid off a decade ago), and reformatting the code is not going to make it any harder to get answers from people who aren't there.

I've been in situations where even without access to the people knowing which of them wrote something gives me a better idea of how to backwards infer what (and of course sadly occasionally 'if') they were thinking while writing the code.

Then again, I think most of the tells for that for me are around the sort of structure that would survive reformatting anyway.

(and, y'know, legacy stuff, everything's a bloody trade-off)

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