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Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

Was the 3M LOC refactoring for yelp.com? The article doesn't say. How could possibly a review site have 3M LOC?

The front-facing system is the smallest part

The admin and back-office system is deeper. Beyond the reviews you also have: events, mailing list management, profile management, messages, i18n, search, etc

Example: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/10/how-we-use-deep-lear...

Edit: still, 3Mi lines is massive. However, I think there's something that contributes significantly: HTML and CSS

Hmm, well even with all those, the amount of code just blows my mind!

Once I was talking to someone from SAP. He told me about their Netweaver framework is 1 billion LOC and 40k SQL tables. That does not include any application, yet.

The biggest reason for the bloat: People are not allowed to change code. You only add code. Now try to add a button to some GUI without changing a single line of the existing code. At this moment I understood, why enterprises produce those overengineered AdapterFactorySingletonDecoratorBridge stuff.

Reminds me of Ubisoft claims that its Assassin's Creed crouching mechanic had 6M LOC

If you pay coders to code, they will give you code, and if you track performance based on their output, the code remains to justify their cost. And it's just hard to delete good work. So everything grows in businesses that hire tons of (good) coders. Pay them to refactor it and they'll do that too :)

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