Thoughts on 500 million lines of code…
Most of our readers here in Canuckland have seen the whole ObamaCare schmozzle down in the US over the past few weeks and one thing really caught my eye – that the website that was supposed to handle the online signups has 500 million lines of code in same.
500,000,000 lines of code….that’s the size of the online site – and if you’ve been reading about same, you’ll have seen that someone has estimated that about 5,000,000 lines of code will need to be re-written….i.e. about 1% of the total codebase is incorrect.
500,000,000 lines of code…that would be by others estimates would be a stack of paper about 3,000 feet tall….weighing about 45 tons and if lined up end-to-end on a single sheet of paper it’d run from our Hamilton City Hall to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
500,000,000 lines of code…when the NASA Space Shuttle used only 400,000 lines of code to control the Shuttles, when the Large Hadron Collider over in Europe uses only 3,500,000 lines of code….when the Google Chrome browser uses only 35,000,000 lines of code to let us browse the internet.
500,000,000 lines of code…when Facebook has about 65,000,000 lines of code….
500,000,000 lines of code…do you see what I see? That this is one big big big software issue….and for the life of me, I can’t “wrap” my head around where one would even begin to look for those “bad apple” 5,000,000 lines of code…this app talks to every single state, insurance company and hundreds of 3rd party suppliers, vendors, insurers etc. etc.
500,000,000 lines of code…what a horrible thing to have to face…as a programmer who’s developed LOC that ran in the low thousands, I know about bugs…finding and fixing same is a challenge NO coder likes to face…so it’s no wonder I shudder thinking about that 1% that needs a look/see, eh….
Points to ponder on same…