[TUHS] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth!

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Feb 16 12:41:08 AEST 2018


On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 09:38:02PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 8:56 PM, Lawrence Stewart <stewart at serissa.com>
> 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.  



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