An interesting look at the reporting on the Healthcare.gov site problems, and how technically unsavvy journalists and "unnamed sources" are busy with bad quotes and spinning responsibility.
What Does Healthcare.gov’s “5 Million Lines of Code” Really Mean?
Last weekend, some anonymous “specialist” told the New York Times that “5 million lines of software code may need to be rewritten” in order to fix the mess that is healthcare.gov. (The good news, according to the source, is that the project has a total of “500 million lines of…
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Considering that Windows XP, an antiquated system, runs 30 million lines of code (pre-SP1), and this is government software that has to be maintained and updated over a ridiculously long period of time, that doesn't surprise me.
One could certainly have put the same software in 100,000 lines of code, but good luck modifying it or maintaining it.
Don't you love technology reporting? Suddenly everyone and his brother is a website designer and software developer.
Ummmmm this 5 million lines of code sounds a little hyperole-ish. If you look at this from a tech point of view and NOT a political point of view, a lot of ignorance is being tossed about. I highly doubt that in the past 9 months of actual web development the contractors write 5 million lines of code (which is far more then windows operating system, Linux kernel and Mac OS. The reality is that there is probably is a lot of API's and libraries, DB connector and probably even the server code being counted. Is their a lot of code/bloat to be changed? sure …. but rewriting 5 million lines makes for great headlines but It's probably far from true,