Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.
And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.
>And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.
You might not think it, but you'd be wrong. Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well.
Since then they added their own compiler and such, but the core of what they do is serving web pages at scale.
All known problems, solved by tens of teams all over the world, even at larger scales (Google for one).
NASA's problem on the other hand is quite unique, any errors can cost lives, and their tasks frequently include totally novel solutions for totally novel problems related to space travel, guidance, simulations, materials science, and so on.
"Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well."
Personally, I think we've all got a piece of the elephant here. It is true that there are no known methodologies that could build Facebook at the speed it has been built without producing a globally-incoherent design. Anything that could produce a globally-coherent design would have slowed them down so much that they wouldn't have been such big winners in the first place. (So "globally incoherent" isn't much of a criticism here, really.)
On the other hand, there are options other than "a big set of PHP CRUD pages and heaps of servers" available to us now, too, and I expect those options to continue to advance in usability. Even the various projects that improve on PHP would bring more benefit if you could use them from day one instead of a retrofit.
Facebook didn't win because of the software, but because of marketing. At its inception, it felt exclusive. You were special of you got an invite.
The other social networks were open season. Facebook made some good design choices with the simple looking UI, and didn't offer the customisations MySpace had. But that's a design choice, not software engineering choice.
No one wins because of the software (code quality). They win on marketing and that software (UIx) doing a needed task people are willing to "pay" for.
HN tends to be rather myopic in that programmers exist to program. Nope. Programmers exist to use a tool to solve a real world problem. The best way to do that is with the minimal amount of design and time required to accomplish the task at the desired level of reliability. Very few projects require anything resembling the "code quality" talked about on HN - in most cases I would say trying to enforce such principles generally result in worse outcomes and folks would have been better off spending 1/10th the money on a 16 year old off elance.com and simply fixed problems as they came up.
Typically the thing that is done the quickest wins, even if the implementation would make you cry. The fact is from a business standpoint - it truly rarely matters. Very little is as critical as people think.
I've noticed the industry becoming vastly disconnected with this fact recently.
Probably true, but it's also important that they did not lose because of the software. There are lot of great ideas that have gone in the drain because of sloppy software.
Many successful companies run the worst software you will ever seen. Yesterday there was a post about MUMPS which got me flashbacks of clients that showed me software that ran their entire 100m+ euro / year factory mostly written in MS Access / Excel on a shared drive (with the lovely locking Windows does!) mostly (this particular client had some CRM and an ERP from Dutch companies 'laying on the shelf' but 'never got around to it'). One of the biggest EU factories that creates the belts for conveyor belts runs on the worst PHP code as ERP I have ever seen. Many sites that are not Google or Facebook etc run on hacked together crap in whatever language and tech and do fine.
Twitter was crap at the start, most software in electronics was beyond unusable until recently (in some systems) etc.
You can of course lose because of sloppy software, but if your marketing is done well, I don't see why that would happen. There is an enormous overestimation how much people care about that kind of thing here on HN. From the first decade of the Windows versions to tons of Twitter outages after the launch to getting their computers hacked, passwords stolen, CCs stolen, privacy taken, slow as molasses systems, forced reboots, many crashes, bodged updates, forced updates, virus/malware scanners taking up 50%+ of your /still too expensive/ resources too much of the time, really bad iteration of the Facebook app at the moment (at least on Android), broken airplane booking forms, 404 support pages etc etc etc and yet no-one goes away because most people curse and move on to whatever. Unless your marketing is bad aka no-one uses it, it usually won't fail because of sloppy software.
If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook.
Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.
Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.