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Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand how they have that much code. 3.5M lines is still crazy - what exactly is all that goop doing?

Tying together fifty states worth of healthcare systems and laws to provide some kind of reasonable abstract interface. On top of systems that may or may not have been designed with this form of use in mind.

Go look up some of your own state's healthcare laws to see how bizarre they can get. Then think about how each state has organically arrived at their own set of bizarre and nebulous laws. Then imagine what the infrastructure built around those laws - adapted over time as they changed and ignored as much as possible - looks like.

People surprised at this number are judging a vast and complicated problem by the (relatively) simple and pretty face plastered on top of it. I'm actually kind of impressed that the number isn't higher.

Maybe they counted all dependencies or libraries. If you add all that to any project, size will grow ridiculously big. I suspect so because the coding part of the project too only half a year or so, so they could not possibly write that many line by hand.

> Maybe they counted all dependencies or libraries.

This is really the only way I can imagine they got to that number.

Spring, a beastly enterprise Java codebase if ever there was one, is still "only" 460K lines of Java code according to cloc.

Most if it is in Java, which is pretty verbose in comparison to many languages.

If Java were actually succinct, it wouldn't be Enterprise™

Does that count auto generated code? I agree that 3.5m loc seems absurd (I work on a complex medical device which has about 1m loc), but to be fair, they do have to talk to a ton of different and incompatible data sources.

AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and friends I guess.

Wouldn't this type of verbosity just increase the length of lines, not the line count?

They counted with word wrap turned on.

And column width set to 10.

import java.languages.english;

import java.languages.english.grammar;

import java.languages.parser;

import java.languages.conceptualunderstanding;

Java is also line verbose. The factory model also leads to not only long names for things but line verbosity in the form of multiple distinct instructions to accomplish something that in other languages might be a short one-liner.

It depends whether lines count statements or lines.

    if (identifiers.length > enough)
    {
        anyStatement.canPrettyMuch(takeUp)
            .asManyActualLines(ofSource.asYouWant())
            .theOnlyLimit.isYour(imagination)
            .FactoryBean();
    }

Lack of code reuse. (other than copy and paste) So they probably do the same thing over and over in different parts of the application.

Reusing code is not trivial, the design has to be good, the code needs to be easy to find and call. It becomes harder as the number of people increases.

I imagine that 90% of that is dealing with the all of the various insurance providers and plans across the states, i.e., glue code/integration logic.

Destroying souls.

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