
Healthcare.gov Lines of Code Comparison - alex_marchant
http://www.alexmarchant.com/blog/2013/10/22/healthcare-dot-gov-lines-of-code-comparison.html
======
ck2
Yeah newsreaders are really bad at single sourcing a quote without qualifying
the source. And then repeating it. Endlessly.

That is basically how we got into the Iraq War, Cheney fed some nonsense to
the NY Times which printed it, then Cheney went on the news the next week and
quoted the NY Times and everyone started repeating the NY Times, when the
original source of the nonsense was him.

By the way, is an opening/closing bracket on its own line a "line of code"?
What if there are 200 million of them? Is that like double spacing your term
papers in large fonts and wide margins to cheat the page requirement?

~~~
zecho
My general rule of thumb with unnamed sources is to completely disregard what
they have to say. With named sources, my general rule of thumb is to assume
they have ulterior motive for speaking to the press, usually apparent by
looking at their job title. My general rule of thumb with all news is to wait
for some distant period of time for the real facts to shake out of the mess of
people talking.

------
inovator
"According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of
software code."

And you guys believe that so call "specialist" without any proof?...What
happened to HN? :/

~~~
shard972
It was good enough for the New York Times though?

~~~
colinbartlett
It's disheartening to think they actually took that statement and printed it
without verification. This simple chart illustrates how foolish that was.

~~~
inovator
They will print anything for views

------
caffeineninja
"According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of
software code."

I call bullshit. Facebook is 62 million KLOC on the main site, excluding the
backend. And I'll argue that Facebook is one of the most complicated sites out
there, feature-wise.

I wonder if this is actually combining all 50 states' health exchanges (and
their third-party insurance API connectors), which MIGHT make sense, given an
average of 10 million lines per state site.

~~~
jamesrom
62 million KLOC = 62,000 million lines of code. I'm calling bullshit on that.

~~~
jpatokal
I presume they meant 62 MLOC.

------
danso
I know the esteemed New York Times made the half-billion-lines of code
assertion, but if you read the actual article, this claim is buried at the
bottom. And this is the context:

> _According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines
> of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically
> about one-fifth that size._

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-
nee...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing-
weeks-to-fix.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&&pagewanted=all)

So "one specialist" figured it out? So who is this unnamed software-whisperer
that the Times reporter picked out? It could be anyone from Linus Torvalds to
an SEO expert, or maybe some doofus consultant who's an expert at getting
gov't contracts and delivering terrible systems (on second thought, that
person probably _would_ know best).

If you consider the other articles written about this, which claim that
contractors only started work anywhere from 7 to 12 months from now...how is
it even physically possible to write 500 million lines of code?

OK, yes, you can do it with copying-pasting, which clearly was part of the
problem (lorem ipsum makes a few appearances in the production
JavaScript)...but who knows what that number actually includes? Just actual
source code? Comments? If the system includes, technically, some distro of
Linux, is that counted?

Speaking of the Linux distro, here's an article from 2008, referring to a
study that found that Fedora 9 had roughly 200 million lines of source code,
and was equivalent to about $10.8 billion worth of dev work:

[http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications...](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications/estimatinglinux.html)

So hey, if we're treating lines of code as fungible quantities, it sounds like
the Feds got quite the deal! (except for the part of it not quite being
reliable)

------
ChuckMcM
As someone else pointed out there are about 380M people living in the US so
perhaps the code is :

    
    
       if (name == "alice adams") {
       } else if (name == "betty adams") {
       ...
       } else if (name == "mark zuckerberg") {
       } else {
           open_dialog("Are you sure you are a US Citizen?");
       }
    

Sillyness I know. I actually agree with many people that someone likely pulled
the "500M" number out of a hat during a stressful moment needing a "really big
number" not thinking about what it meant if that was in fact the number.

~~~
ck2
It is also possible they are including the insurance provider database rows as
"code".

------
Falkon1313
Perhaps 317 million lines are a hardcoded list of every man, woman, and child
in the U.S. That would leave only 183 million.

------
dfbrown
That 323 million lines of code for Debian 5.0 also counts all the packages
included with debian. The debian codebase by itself is only 68 million lines
of code: [http://www.ohloh.net/p/debian](http://www.ohloh.net/p/debian)

~~~
alex_marchant
Good catch, I'll update this soon.

------
oomkiller
Looking through the source code posted elsewhere, it appears to make heavy use
of AndroMDA internally, which appears to generate Java classes from UML
diagrams. I think that's important to keep in mind when judging the 500m
figure, as 500m computer generated code != 500m human code.

~~~
ssafejava
Have you found marketplace backend code anywhere? The frontend code is easy to
find and there's at least one repo with it (see my previous code) but I'd be
very interested to see backend code.

------
adamnemecek
If you look at the code, e.g.

[https://gist.github.com/adamnemecek/7112729/raw/deb521f699d3...](https://gist.github.com/adamnemecek/7112729/raw/deb521f699d35df9758305a5191a6283e07e37dc/registration.js)

500 million LOC seems less unrealistic.

/s

~~~
ck2
That is the FRONT end which is open-source. Made by different people.

The BACK end is closed source, made by CGI and others.

~~~
meowface
Of course, but I would be shocked if the backend was more than even 3-5
million lines.

~~~
ck2
The back end is the entire API.

But I tend to agree the size claimed has to be way off.

They might be including database rows as "code" who knows.

------
newobj
This post is garbage and perpetuating this false statistic is useless noise.

------
chewxy
Someone must be practicing enterprise coding. See also:
[https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...](https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition)

------
spullara
The entire site is generated via Jekyll with every possible permeation. I just
made that up. But it does use Jekyll.

[https://github.com/greggersh/healthcare.gov#install-
jekyll](https://github.com/greggersh/healthcare.gov#install-jekyll)

~~~
zecho
The front end does, that was built by Development Seed. The problems have
seemed to come from other contractors, such as CGI Federal, though I'm loathe
to trust anything I've read in the news about this clusterfuck so far. The
reporting has been so bad it rivals Healthcare.gov itself in its awfulness.

~~~
ssafejava
The craziest part has been the hysteria about the healthcare.gov repository
going down. It never contained any files that were useful to anyone - it was
just the blog / landing page. It's like Microsoft promising to open-source
their operating system and all you get is the software that generates the help
files.

------
zekenie
Why? Literally, how could this be? I think they must be counting every
dependency twice.

------
GovStuff
Jesus, it's disappointing that HN is focused on this silly statistic instead
of actually talking about the problem stalling millions of Americans right now
from enrolling. Considering HN is kind of, like, the epitome of technical
talent on the Internet. They would know best how to solve HealthCare.gov's
problems.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596981)

------
softbuilder
seeds orange apple apple Apple applesauce [rooty tooty fresh and fruity
breakfast]

------
AgLiAn
import *; // so much work, almost 500 millions lines of code

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mumbi
Ah, it all makes sense now. For about a dollar a line, I wouldn't give a shit
either.

------
FrankenPC
...

HAHAHAHA!!!

