HealthCare.Gov Needs Five Million Code Lines Rewritten

national review ^

[Sub-Driver]

HealthCare.Gov Needs Five Million Code Lines Rewritten By Andrew Johnson October 21, 2013 9:13 AM Comments 42

Obamacare’s online exchanges have been riddled with problems since they came online three weeks ago, and those issues may continue for at least the next few weeks. Contractors said fixing the problems by the November 1 deadline set by the administration would be “unrealistic,” according to the New York Times.

From the sluggish websites to garbled enrollment information, the flaws require the extensive rewriting of code: “One specialist said that as many as five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the Web site runs properly,” the Times reports — that’s out of a total of approximately 500 million lines of code, according to another expert.

Others experts warned that some of the website’s problem are yet to come. One technical specialist involved in the repair effort said, “The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later.”

[Lazamataz]

I like Ada. Pretty readable. But then again I cut my teeth on Cobol, Foxpro, and now C#, so I went progressively less-readable.

[Lazamataz]

It's funny. I'm wondering if Cruz had some inside info on the problems of the website. He and the House Repubs demanded that ObamaCare be postponed for a year. So naturally Obama COULD NOT allow Obamacare to be postponed for even a day, since that would mean that Republicans had "won". So it rolled out on schedule, to be a complete disaster, because the boy-child could not give even the appearance of the Repubs winning at anything.

WELL THOUGHT. Cruz may just be playing chess, here.

[OneWingedShark]

There is a reason why major software projects use something scalable like Java, or C#.

The YF-22 (Raptor prototype) used Ada and was [source]:

• Software for the aircraft (35% of total avionics development cost)
• Developed by 8 geographically separated subcontractors
• Developed using different Ada compilers and hardware platforms
• 650 Ada modules
• Millions of SLOC
• Integrated in 3 days!

That last point is simply amazing.

[Myrddin]

Y2K remediation kept me very occupied at Lufthansa in Frankfurt-am-Main. It was a lot of work. We succeeded in fixing the problem. It was no picnic. The Germans hired us because their union/insurance rules restricted allowable work hours to the point that they had no hope of finishing in the time permitted. As American contractors, we didn't have the same restrictions as the German employees. By the time we finished, I was pretty burned out on foreign travel.

[newnhdad]

at least we know where the extra $800 billion is going..

[OneWingedShark]

I like Ada. Pretty readable. But then again I cut my teeth on Cobol, Foxpro, and now C#, so I went progressively less-readable.

LOL - You'd think it'd be the other way.

I started on TPW 1.5 [i.e TP 7 w/ geared for Windows], moved to Delphi 5, then started college where we did C, Java/C++, upon graduation I did PHP and a little C# for employment — I picked up Ada doing hobby stuff at the end of college, after the Languages course introduced me and, well, I love the design concerns of readability and maintainability.

During the employment stint I did doing PHP I quickly came to miss a lot of Ada features:

1. Types - PHP made me learn to hate implicit conversion. "08" => (int) 0. Yep.
2. Subtypes - Seriously, why do most languages skip over value-restriction? W do it all the time in math (Given X, a positive integer…)
3. Packages - Why is there no grouping in PHP aside from the OOP bolt-on?
4. Generics - I hated having to track down cut-and-paste programming bugs.
5. Parameter Name-association - Because of $haystack/$needle vs $needle/$haystack parameter-order.
6. Calendar-package - the Date object is… unwieldy. (Because of the 'helpful' string-parsing it would do.)

I'm kinda interested in learning COBOL, not for general-programming but in case I get a job having to deal w/ reports. (IIUC COBOL is unmatched for such processing.)

[OneWingedShark]

Try vacuum tubes and punch cards.

Too reliable.

[/snark]

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Contractors said fixing the problems by the November 1 deadline set by the administration would be “unrealistic,”

Let the boy-king issue unrealistic edicts. Rush it. Compound your errors. Let it buuuuuuuurn.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

That said, although I agree "never ascribe to malevolence, that which can be adequately explained by incompetence"

I'm sticking with that. Here are some reasons:

- Obama has no understanding of business. In his Marxist mind, anyone can run a car company or a solar panel company, so you might as well hand them over to your cronies.

- The owner of the Canadian company was a classmate of Chewbacca.

- The Canadian company was already canned, or is being sued, for similar negligence.

[Political Junkie Too]

Incompetence does not adequately explain it, and therefore as a professional in the industry I have to ascribe a certain purposefulness to the disaster unfolding.

I think I read elsewhere that Obama had a certain "Manhattan Project" attitude about this, compartmentalizing the requirements and delaying the sharing of it until after the 2012 elections, because he didn't want to give the GOP any campaign fodder.

It's the same reason that Harry Reid wouldn't pass a budget in the Senate - he didn't want to give the GOP any campaign issues.

So, I don't think the "malevolence" was an attempt to sabotage the project. I it think it was a fear of opponents finding out the details, and so they withheld the details from the programmers for as long as they could get away with.

And now we see the results.

-PJ

[OneWingedShark]

I never knew any developer who gave it any credence.

It usually comes up in debates (i.e. holy-wars) regarding programming languages…

[OneWingedShark]

It's [compartmentalization] the same reason that Harry Reid wouldn't pass a budget in the Senate - he didn't want to give the GOP any campaign issues.

So why is it Bohner seems utterly incapable/reluctant to take a stand on anything?

[Political Junkie Too]

Boehner was able, at least, to get a budget passed.

The House passed budgets each year. Remember the so-called "Ryan Plan?"

The only reason that Paul Ryan was selected as Romney's VP was because his budget proposal is the one that passed the House in 2012. It was supposed to be the basis for Romney's campaign -- that the House had a plan and the Senate did not.

The problem with Boehner is that he prefers to be non-confrontational.

-PJ

[OneWingedShark]

The problem with Boehner is that he prefers to be non-confrontational.

I'm non-confrontational, and yet I have enough spine/sense/dignity that I'd have to make a stand on something.
I'm told I have an over-sensitive sense of [in]justice — as such, I couldn't see letting Fast & Furious [which is state-sponsored-terrorism and Treason] lay quietly. (I believe it is even more egregious [and provably Treasonous] than Benghazi or NSA's Prism [though Prism is more egregious in itself, contrary to Amendments 1/4/5/6, it is not easily proved as Treason].)

[Lazamataz]

Generics are a big deal in C# too. It's great. I can toss objects around, wrapped in, say, a generic List<> and do all sorts of manipulation. Handy.

One area of C# I would have liked to see them expand, that for some reason they just left stand, was Linq-2-SQL. It allowed for direct reflection against SQL, so I could be sure that strong typing was implicit in the Linq control surface to the DB. It also produced, for me, all the objects right off of the SQL reflection. Timesaving as heck!

Don't know why Linq kinda just stayed where it was. They spent more time on Presentation Foundation and Communication Foundation, when I feel the time would have been better-spent fleshing the Linq concept out more.

[OneWingedShark]

One area of C# I would have liked to see them expand, that for some reason they just left stand, was Linq-2-SQL. It allowed for direct reflection against SQL, so I could be sure that strong typing was implicit in the Linq control surface to the DB. It also produced, for me, all the objects right off of the SQL reflection. Timesaving as heck!

I haven't had much Linq/SQL experience. As I read it though it seemed pretty nice: especially the strong-typing on SQL. (Most of the C# maintenance stuff I do have their SQL in objects piped into the DB, then the results might be parsed/converted into integers or passed out as Strings… it works, for the most part, and the company doesn't want to refactor it.)

Generics are a big deal in C# too. It's great. I can toss objects around, wrapped in, say, a generic List<T> and do all sorts of manipulation. Handy.

True; I've used that myself once to refactor/greatly-simplify a "random-picker bound to a pool of values" (used Fisher-Yates to improve its runtime and make it repeatable/auditable) instead of the mess of repeated-random-picks that was originally there.

Generics are really great stuff; I found this paper on Ada 83's generic/package interaction that simply blew me away w/ its creative uses of generic's WRT packages.

[Robert Teesdale]

Noted, but I don’t think the Obama administration depends on the love of the Fourth Estate... hence the radical increase in leak prosecutions. Carrot + stick + early escalation = compliance.

[Robert Teesdale]

- Obama has no understanding of business. In his Marxist mind, anyone can run a car company or a solar panel company, so you might as well hand them over to your cronies.

While that's undoubtedly true, and true in a downwards cascade through his administration, at some point there has to have been alarms sounded "this is going to implode".

- The owner of the Canadian company was a classmate of Chewbacca.

Well, no surprise there - that's how it works.

- The Canadian company was already canned, or is being sued, for similar negligence

Hadn't heard that yet.

[Robert Teesdale]

I think I read elsewhere that Obama had a certain "Manhattan Project" attitude about this, compartmentalizing the requirements and delaying the sharing of it until after the 2012 elections, because he didn't want to give the GOP any campaign fodder.

That's probably true.

It's the same reason that Harry Reid wouldn't pass a budget in the Senate - he didn't want to give the GOP any campaign issues.

Ditto, same approach.

So, I don't think the "malevolence" was an attempt to sabotage the project. I it think it was a fear of opponents finding out the details, and so they withheld the details from the programmers for as long as they could get away with.

Noted, but I disagree that "adequately explains" with incompetence. It simply presents as too big of a fail to be that simple.

And now we see the results.

Yes, and whether planned or unplanned, the results are ugly.

[i_robot73]

You think some company making $600+M is going to let anything like that ‘leak’? Not if it’d stop the gravy train...