I doubt it.
Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#12Foursquare had about 1.2M lines of code about a year ago (the last time I counted). And that's counting everything: code, tests, HTML & CSS, 3 mobile clients, various toolchain/support projects.
500M seems impossible.
EDIT: It occurs to me that I'm only counting code we wrote ourselves. We, unsurprisingly, use a bunch of open source libraries & third party tools. If you counted up all the lines of code in all those things maybe you get to 500M? Maybe?
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#13One way to get to that number is to count all the code that interfaces with Healthcare.gov. For example, we know that Healthcare.gov interfaces with Social Security, IRS, and Homeland Security databases. I suspect, but have not seen it documented, that it could also be interfacing with one or many databases in each of the 36 states it covers as the federal exchange. Add up the complexity of all these systems and SWAG the number of lines of code.
Another way to get there could be metaprogramming. If you have a Java code writing C code writing web pages [1], you'll get progressively larger number of lines of code depending on where you take the count.
Another way could be needless, but legally mandated, duplication. For example since insurance is state-regulated, what if the law mandates data isolation per state--so there are 36 separate data stores: one for each state. That would give you 36 times as many "lines of code" if you were extremely literal in adding it all up.
These are all silly of course. But everything surrounding PPACA seems like it has to be silly, so why not this?
[1] I don't actually believe this is the stack.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#14When I do front-end web code, I get 300-500 lines of code a day on a day when I sit back and think to myself: “Wow I really hit that hard today”, and other days where I have to prep graphics, correspond with co-workers, or produce mockups I end up writing considerably less code.
I am aware that writing templates, or using LESS or SCSS can let you generate more lines in output from a much smaller input, but they can't be counting the final output as what will have to be re-written.
I'm not mathematician, but let's say 500 lines of usable code is a good day, that means for this project that would require one million days worth of 'hitting it hard' and not doing any graphics work, correspondence, or any extraneous tasks - JUST code writing.
The timeline for this project was what, 3 years? So in order for 1 million human-days of writing code to take place in 3 years (1095 days), that would require what, 913 monkeys bashing away at keyboards non-stop for 8 hours a day? I mean it is feasible, but that's a gargantuan undertaking and I can't see how something so large could possibly be designed to run an application with so few features.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quote was "According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code." So I would highly doubt that "software code" would also include comments.
Why would you think that? Most executable code includes lots of comments, unless it's been preprocessed. Still, I agree the figure is outrageous.
I don't usually count comments to as lines of code. I didn't realize that some people did. Perhaps I'm just unusual in how I count them. It seems there's some ambiguity however so it's very possible that they were counting comments after all.