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No, HealthCare.gov Doesn't Require 500 Million Lines of Code

Posted by Soulskill on from the but-somebody-on-the-teevee-said-so dept.

itwbennett writes: "Half a billion lines of code for a transactional website — more than five times as much code as that behind OS X — just didn't pass the sniff test. But just how many lines of code does it take to generate HealthCare.gov? This question came up on Reddit again last week and it appears that we may now have an answer. One commenter who claimed to have worked on HealthCare.gov as part of the post launch clean-up crew at the end of 2013, provided counts of the lines of code behind HealthCare.gov, broken down by programming/markup language."

9 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. 646 lines of Perl? by angularbanjo · · Score: 5, Funny

    That much Perl?
    That's probably the whole app there, with each line being around 10,000 characters of obfuscated self-referencing goodness.

    The rest is just quotes from Tolkien.

    1. Re:646 lines of Perl? by wonderboss · · Score: 3, Funny

      It originally contained no Perl.
      One of the experts they hired to fix it, rewrote the entire front end Perl.
      They left the old source code lying around just to help hide the Perl.

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      more cowbell
    2. Re:646 lines of Perl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      It originally contained no Perl.
      One of the experts they hired to fix it, rewrote the entire front end Perl.
      They left the old source code lying around just to help hide the Perl.

      They liked their code, and they got to keep it.

      Lucky them.

    3. Re:646 lines of Perl? by glwtta · · Score: 3, Funny

      One of the experts they hired to fix it, rewrote the entire front end Perl.

      So, what's the other 500 lines, then?

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
  2. 47449 lines of Maven (pom.xml) by Tailhook · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hmm.

    Could we, perhaps, use some of the techniques that people have speculated about for deflecting space rocks and, instead, guide one into Earth deliberately?

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    Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  3. Re:So now we're trusting blogs face value? by Ksevio · · Score: 4, Funny

    Of course not! We're trusting blogs that cite reddit comments. Since the comment got "Reddit gold" it must be trustworthy.

  4. Count faster by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't see how they could have reported 500 million lines of code in the first place. The Congressional authorization to spend $30 million to study the best way to count lines isn't even out of the House committee yet.

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    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  5. 2.4M Lines of Java? by hondo77 · · Score: 4, Funny

    To be fair, most of that is probably getters and setters.

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    I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
  6. Re: So now we're trusting blogs face value? by Wdomburg · · Score: 4, Funny

    In other words, it's not only on the internet, but it's been vouched for by anonymous sources. It clearly must be true.