Proper Disdain for ANSI-89 Join Format

Andy Brownsword has it together:

It’s a legacy pattern, and thankfully it’s rare to see these in the wild nowadays.

The legacy OUTER JOIN syntax (*= and =*) which used to accompany these was deprecated, and finally removed in *checks watch* SQL Server 2012, so that’s one less reason to see the aging syntax.

Every time I see this format, I despise it. Andy explains exactly why. We’ve had better options for more than 30 years, yet people still choose to write code this way.