Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#1

Post by noahlt » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:26 AM UTC

Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site
nytimes.com

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#2

Post by conover » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:40 AM UTC

That's a staggering amount of code. Nearly unbelievable. To put that in perspective, Windows XP was 45 million lines of code[0].

[0] https://m.facebook.com/windows/posts/155741344475532

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#3

Post by jussij » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:42 AM UTC

From the page:

One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly.

It sounds like they've been doing a little too much coding and not enough designing.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#4

Post by chill1 » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:43 AM UTC

Use mobile version to get around the pay-wall: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-...

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#5

Post by ddoolin » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:43 AM UTC

I understand this website is probably more complex than your average website, but I would put money -- a lot of money -- on it being nowhere near 500 million lines.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#6

Post by codygman » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:43 AM UTC

No wonder it doesn't work. It's very unlikely that healthcare.gov is more complex than an OS (such as XP noted by conover in this thread).

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#7

Post by EdgarVerona » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:44 AM UTC

conover wrote: post #2

That's a staggering amount of code. Nearly unbelievable. To put that in perspective, Windows XP was 45 million lines of code[0]. [0] https://m.facebook.com/windows/posts/155741344475532

Yeah, I'd call total BS on that number, unless they did something absolutely insane... I mean, we're talking "instead of saving user information in the database, we codegen'd a set of classes specifically for each regisered user and save them to our repository" level of insanity. Has there ever been software that's even come close to approaching 500 million lines of code?

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#8

Post by tonyfelice » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:44 AM UTC

conover wrote: post #2

That's a staggering amount of code. Nearly unbelievable. To put that in perspective, Windows XP was 45 million lines of code[0]. [0] https://m.facebook.com/windows/posts/155741344475532

My reaction as well. Even 500 million bytes would be hard to believe.

While "efficient" is not a word that comes to mind when thinking about the government, 500 lines of code would be 1.6 lines for every man, woman, and child in this country.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#9

Post by tunesmith » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:45 AM UTC

I wonder what languages it focuses on. I haven't heard.

I find some of it amusing - I've worked on some enterprise-level projects with business systems talking to other business systems, and I can only imagine how much eye-rolling is going on among the programmers that are actually trying to do the work. This is a project where some very visible, loud people have a vested interest in it looking bad even if it were flawless.

I actually think it would be kind of fun to be close enough to the technology to really identify the core constraints and be in a position to help alleviate them.

Re: Contractors See Weeks of Work on Health Site

#10

Post by jlgreco » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 4:45 AM UTC

jussij wrote: post #3

From the page: One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly. It sounds like they've been doing a little too much coding and not enough designing.

My first thought was the exact opposite.