What’s Wrong with Healthcare.gov: A Technical Run-Down
additiveanalytics.com> The site is 500 million lines of code—an astonishing size for a web service, let alone a new one.
I wish people would stop repeating this.
"For comparison, a space shuttle"
What is a space shuttle? Do they mean a space shuttle cargo bay full of backup tapes or microsd cards, which at orbit speed is pretty good bandwidth? Do they mean the PASS implementation, or the separately developed BFS implementation, or both added together, or which ever is larger (probably PASS?)? I can assume they don't even know the main computer doesn't run the engines directly, they have their own dedicated controllers. Along with pretty much every other system and payload that hooks up to electrical power. Does he mean the original mechanical avionics or the 90s glass cockpit upgrade? Oh wait, I bet I know, he pulled out a random number that sounded nice. That's the ticket.
And obviously 'bamacare was implemented in HAL/S just like the shuttle computers, so that's a Very meaningful direct comparison.
(Edited to add, I think I figured out how he came up with 400Kloc for the shuttle. PASS ran in quadruplicate on 4 of 5 processors (he's probably ignoring the BFS implementation) so to someone who doesn't know anything about computers, that means 4 computers each with 100Kloc. Now HAL/S has a strange source format where you can specify sub/super scripts on separate lines, so each "line of code" takes up 3 lines of text (superscript, text, and subscript) so thats 33K or so what we'd call LOC. Now each AP-101 has a general processor which does the work and an IO processor. The IO processor, critically, has about 25K words of ram, which is suspiciously rounding error compatible with the 33K or so lines of code we're hearing about. It is of course bogus and meaningless numerology, which means its perfect for the article.)