With no time to refactor, when you are working on legacy code, with the most awful conventions, what is the best practice? Will trying to follow better coding style would improve readability or actually hurt it?For example, in java method names are usually camel cased:myGoodNamedMethodBut in the repository there are code with methods like this (not all, but the majority)my_c_style_method_that_looks_off_in_java
Code Base with awful code conventions, follow them?
coding style;coding standards
No matter how odd you find the existing conventions, FOLLOW THEM. Having some conventions, even if you don't like them, is FAR FAR better than not having any. Obviously that's not always true (some conventions are outright hostile to getting work done, like limiting all names to 8 characters for no good reason), but except in the most extreme cases, just follow what's there.