It depends on what the documentation is. If it's 100 pages of "AbstractClassFactoryClassFactoryFactory is a class that builds AbstractClassFactoryClassFactory objects", then that's useless.

Also explains why it's 200,000 lines of code, for something that should be an order of magnitude smaller.

Why do you say that has to be order of magnitude smaller? Other BigTable clones like HBase are atleast 100K lines of code, if not more.

A project I'm working on with a similar level of intricacy as BigTable has way less than 100K, and that's in a language more verbose than Java.

200k lines ... of which 85k lines are generated from Thrift and 10% from other projects, according to related ML discussions.

Another Java hater? :s

Government & consulting projects generally require the code and the use of the code to be fully documented. I'm actually looking forward to that part of it more than the software if it is any good.

NSA uses Java. Great to know. Apparently the professionals at the NSA are not swayed by fashion.

That's a ridiculous defense: they were obviously swayed by fashion at some point. It just happened several years ago.

You appear to tilting at windmills of your own making. What I find ridiculous. Is your claim of having had a window into the operational decisions of NSA back when they opted for Java.

Let me see if I understand your argument.

If they had chosen a newer language you didn't approve of, you would have glibly dismissed their engineering decision as "being swayed by fashion."

Since they chose Java, though, the engineers are being "professional" and anyone saying that their decision was swayed by fashion is being "ridiculous," claiming to have a "window into the operational decisions of NSA."

A little bias here perhaps?

They use more "fashionable" languages too. Just not for distributed databases. Most popular open source databases are also written in C/C++/Java.

200k. Why do Java programs always balloon up?

Zawinski's Law.