From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 18:41:08 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth! In-Reply-To: References: <20180216011815.GD8295@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20180216024108.GG8295@mcvoy.com> On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 09:38:02PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 8:56 PM, Lawrence Stewart > wrote: > > > ITA???s airline flight booking system, that was used by Orbitz and others > > was pretty much entirely written in Common LISP, and it was certainly both > > large and commercially successful. Orbitz was bought by Google for $700 > > million. I don???t know how much of the LISP survived sustained attention by > > Google. > > > > Google bought ITA, not Orbitz. Most of the logic in QPX is still in Common > Lisp, but it's not what you'd call "idiomatic" CL code. If one reads a > bunch of Paul Graham and Peter Norvig books and then gets onto QPX with the > expectation of that sort of elegance, you end up pretty unhappy pretty > quick. They do a lot of things very differently to squeeze as much > performance as they can out of what has, historically speaking, been a > fairly mediocre compiler. Which is sort of my point. I don't know all the details but lisp and performance is not a thing.