Obamacare: 500M Lines of Code, $500M, 60% Complete, No Surprise.
And yet, the 500 million figure is apparently true. I’ve heard it dozens of times in the last month, and no one is denying it. Healthcare.gov apparently really does have 500 million lines of code. How is that possible?
I get a picture in my mind of 1,000 people sitting a computers typing code, without worrying about whether or not it works. Given the size of the catastrophe, some variation of that must have happened.
More important than that, a code base that size is unsupportable. Health services is a rapidly changing field, and every time there’s some kind of process or rule change, it will take an army of programmers to make all the necessary changes in the code base. And that assumes that all the bugs have been fixed, which is far from true. Healthcare.gov will not be fully functional at any time in the foreseeable future, if ever.
You start with amateur hour, add in money, corruption, misleading the public, arrogance and stir. The result: healthcare.gov, not to mention Obamacare.
I’ve heard this from one other software engineer as well, whose looked at the Healthcare.gov code: It’s 500 M lines of code, and it’s unmaintainable. I remember he compared it to Windows, which at least used to be 50 M lines of code. I don’t know what that count is for Windows 8. Microsoft has managed to maintain it, but it’s been a hard slog.
Something interesting I found, doing some research, is that Debian Linux, the full distribution, was at one point 324 M lines of code, though most of that is likely tools that are maintained by their own groups. So that isn’t just from one maintainer, and most of them are based on a well-established code base that’s been built up over the course of 30+ years, riding on the legacy of Unix.
The gov’t is declaring “victory” from the fact that Healthcare.gov can now handle 50,000 users at a time (yipee. I can’t contain my excitement). Amazon.com handles millions of users *per day*. They’ve also announced that they’ve reached 500,000 people who’ve signed up, but they’re still mum on how many have enrolled. Insurers continue to complain about low enrollment, and getting erroneous data. Part of that is the system enrolling people, and then immediately canceling them. Oh joy. “You thought you were enrolled? Guess again! Our system messed up. Oopsey-daisy. Don’t get mad. Don’t yell at me. There are going to be some bumps in the road (and you just hit one of them, see?). We’re making sure that everybody gets health care! Yes, I know. You just lost yours. Sorry. Try again.”
This is going to be a never-ending cluster, causing suffering and frustration, until we elect people who will get rid of it.