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Comment by Phlarp | Hacker News Reader

What could you possibly need that many individual yet mostly similar languages to accomplish? Even if we grouped things like XSD, XSLT into the XML category or Groovy and JSP into the Java category it feels silly to need this many languages in a single app.

I can only imagine what kind of things all the long tail files are doing. A smattering of Perl and Python, then a lonely VB and ASP.NET page?

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I don't understand, are you saying that there are too many languages? I find it very reasonable: - css, js, html are unavoidable for a web app - sql is as standard as it gets for interacting with your database - shell is also widely used as a glue + mini tools/scripts - maven, xml, xsd, xslt are pretty much all xml, and good luck writing a modern java app without touching it - java is the main language in there.

If anything I'm surprised at the small number of languages.

It would be way bigger for the project I'm currently working on at work: we have python for scripting and integration tests, ruby for chef deployment, java as the main language, some shell tools, js/html/css/xml/yml, some legacy groovy, etc..

It's very common to have little scripts and tools hacked together that are rarely used (or even one-offs) making it to the main codebase.

As for the number of lines of code, I don't know how they count libraries and dependencies, but with maven it's very common to be pulling half the universe's libraries through transitive dependencies for parts of the libs that are not even used. It doesn't mean your code is wrong.

It feels like people are just trying to find reasons to criticize that project.

I've used cloc a fair bit... cloc is a bit sketchy in recognizing code occasionally. I wouldn't trust the "tail" of its output, it's frequently wrong or misleading down there.

That probably explains the 5 lines of Python there.

Yep. In the same Reddit thread, someone ran cloc on the Linux Kernel, and it even reported one ASP.NET file in there too (just like it did with the Healthcare.gov source):

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/265yns/mill...

This was also my first impression. Clearly this was not a well thought out project from any perspective.

I will double clutch on my rant about government inefficiencies for now, but man alive what a mess.

Sounds like lots of small groups doing their own thing without working together.

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