6 ms·

Always curious as to why Google hosted/created these, anyone know why? I wasn't aware of Google using Common Lisp.

felideon 8y ago
ITA Software — the company that wrote the engine behind Orbitz, Kayak, etc. and now runs Google Flights — was acquired by them a while back.
- justinpombrio 8y ago
  Off topic, but since I worked at Kayak let me expand a bit on its relationship to ITA as I understood it. Airlines and hotels had data about flights and available rooms. Kayak needed this data to show it in your search. This could happen in a few ways: 1. The airline or hotel could send Kayak data that had a particular format, and Kayak would deal with it. A common format, especially for hotels IIRC, was invalid csv files. 2. The airline could send its flight data to ITA, which standardized it across all airlines that used the service. ITA was a separate company from Kayak and Google flights and other flight search engines; it aggregated data but was not a search engine. [EDIT: was not primarily a search engine. See comment below.] Kayak would buy data from ITA. 3. The airline or hotel could decline to let Kayak list its flights/rooms. Since then Google bought ITA, breaking the [EDIT: partial] separation between the most common flight-data aggregator and flight search engines. (Which was probably good for competition; I was a little concerned about the merger.) And Kayak was bought out too, by one of its competitors. Take all this with a grain of salt: this is what I remember from years ago, and it wasn't really my area. And I certainly don't speak for Kayak.
  - snazz 8y ago
    Interesting! I wonder why ITA never offered a search engine themselves, if they had all the data aggregated. And boy do I love dealing with invalid CSVs... (especially ones that contain commas within the fields by accident)
    - wbl 8y ago
      They did! Matrix.itasoftware.com
      - snazz 8y ago
        Oh, nice. It looks pretty fancy, too. I’m surprised that Google didn’t axe it in favor of Google Flights.
        justinpombrio 8y ago
        I suspect that branding is powerful, so it's better to keep an existing flight search running than to axe it in favor of something else and loose all the existing customers. Google bought ITA and kept matrix.itasoftware.com running with (presumably) the same branding; Booking Holdings bought Kayak and kept kayak.com running with the same branding.
        lkirk 8y ago
        The title of the site is "Matrix - ITA Software by Google". Also, on the site, they link themselves: Want to explore flights and get fast results? Try Google Flights Almost seems like a deprecation notice...
        cracauer 8y ago
        There are some feature in matrix that flights didn't pick up. The original matrix site was even more powerful and exposed some operator-ishness, depending on what kind of account you were granted.
      - setr 8y ago
        I want it noted that this thing is really neat — you can provide parameters like min layover of 2 hrs, or 2 weeks, and even search only within a particular airline alliance
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - cracauer 8y ago
    Not to mention almost all US based carriers and many others use ITA's flight search service to power their own (the carriers') websites. They can't search in the data they created, so they have to pay ITA. The data is complicated and many-sourced. Fares and rules come out of ATPCO. Flights are separate from a different supplier. Seat availability is a massive collection of data morphing at 10 Hz, and it has nothing to do with whether seats are available. Then there is taxes and government fees which I think are now ATPCO, too. The timezone file I have seen at ITA still beats any other timezone collection I have ever seen. It's busy over there and the wires are glowing.
    - bogomipz 8y ago
      >"Not to mention almost all US based carriers and many others use ITA's flight search service to power their own (the carriers') websites. They can't search in the data they created, so they have to pay ITA." Can you say why aren't carriers able to search in the data they created without using ITA?
      - cracauer 8y ago
        Exactly. You have to realize the difference between a "pricing search" and a "low fare search", to use ITA terminology. A "pricing search" knows which specific flights it goes through and you just find the fares (keep in mind the carriers file like 600 fares for planes with 20 seats). The airlines could always do that. Before ITA came along in 2001 or so that is what you were waiting on in the travel agency while the agent tries different flight combinations by hand. "Low fare search" is also finding the flights. The carriers could not generally do that without ITA. There are exceptions such as Southwest which had a fare structure more like buses that kept the combinatorics down. But in addition to the immense amounts of fare and rule data that pile on your if you search 400 itineraries out * 400 back you also have the seat availability system. No carrier had (probably has) a system that can answer the amount of "seat" queries that a single low fare search causes. Keep in mind "seat availability data" has nothing to do with what seats are available. It is a high-frequency (10 Hz or whereabouts) way to turn fares on and off.
- satvikpendem 8y ago
  Paul Graham wrote about the advantages ITA had by using Lisp, interestingly enough. http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
  - keithmcorbett 8y ago
    Fun fact: co-founders of ITA and Kayak were co-workers on the core product team at Interleaf. Paul Graham Worked at Interleaf in the consulting group. We all worked together on a major overhaul of Interleaf publishing software based on embedded Lisp. Interleaf 5 was about 10 years ahead of its time in many ways, and was eventually (mostly) crushed by lower cost competitors FrameMaker and (ugh) M$ Word. Paul brought some Interleafers into Viaweb.
man213 8y ago
https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  Thanks!, I had not seen the style guide. As someone else said, this probably comes from Google’s purchase of ITA. Common Lisp is stable, well documented, many fine implementations so I find it odd that there are only pockets of developers/companies who use it. Similar situation with Haskell.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Low popularity, meaning it's much more difficult to find employees proficient in it, making it a bad proposition for companies... which keeps it unpopular. The vicious cycle of fashion.
    - jackdaniel 8y ago
      If such vicious cycles were true no new programming language would gain adoption; after all even Java was "a new language" at some point of time.
      - lispm 8y ago
        What Java helped was the big pockets of SUN / later Oracle, because it was their language. Initially for small machines, it then helped them to sell lots of hardware into the 'enterprise' running slow (but portable) Java applications.
  - cracauer 8y ago
    That guide is mostly what the reservation system used (now canceled). At the time of the merger QPX (the flight search) was ... diversely styled.
    - robert-brown 8y ago

ITA Software — the company that wrote the engine behind Orbitz, Kayak, etc. and now runs Google Flights — was acquired by them a while back.

justinpombrio 8y ago
Off topic, but since I worked at Kayak let me expand a bit on its relationship to ITA as I understood it. Airlines and hotels had data about flights and available rooms. Kayak needed this data to show it in your search. This could happen in a few ways: 1. The airline or hotel could send Kayak data that had a particular format, and Kayak would deal with it. A common format, especially for hotels IIRC, was invalid csv files. 2. The airline could send its flight data to ITA, which standardized it across all airlines that used the service. ITA was a separate company from Kayak and Google flights and other flight search engines; it aggregated data but was not a search engine. [EDIT: was not primarily a search engine. See comment below.] Kayak would buy data from ITA. 3. The airline or hotel could decline to let Kayak list its flights/rooms. Since then Google bought ITA, breaking the [EDIT: partial] separation between the most common flight-data aggregator and flight search engines. (Which was probably good for competition; I was a little concerned about the merger.) And Kayak was bought out too, by one of its competitors. Take all this with a grain of salt: this is what I remember from years ago, and it wasn't really my area. And I certainly don't speak for Kayak.
- snazz 8y ago
  Interesting! I wonder why ITA never offered a search engine themselves, if they had all the data aggregated. And boy do I love dealing with invalid CSVs... (especially ones that contain commas within the fields by accident)
  - wbl 8y ago
    They did! Matrix.itasoftware.com
    - snazz 8y ago
      Oh, nice. It looks pretty fancy, too. I’m surprised that Google didn’t axe it in favor of Google Flights.
      - justinpombrio 8y ago
        I suspect that branding is powerful, so it's better to keep an existing flight search running than to axe it in favor of something else and loose all the existing customers. Google bought ITA and kept matrix.itasoftware.com running with (presumably) the same branding; Booking Holdings bought Kayak and kept kayak.com running with the same branding.
      - lkirk 8y ago
        The title of the site is "Matrix - ITA Software by Google". Also, on the site, they link themselves: Want to explore flights and get fast results? Try Google Flights Almost seems like a deprecation notice...
      - cracauer 8y ago
        There are some feature in matrix that flights didn't pick up. The original matrix site was even more powerful and exposed some operator-ishness, depending on what kind of account you were granted.
    - setr 8y ago
      I want it noted that this thing is really neat — you can provide parameters like min layover of 2 hrs, or 2 weeks, and even search only within a particular airline alliance
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- cracauer 8y ago
  Not to mention almost all US based carriers and many others use ITA's flight search service to power their own (the carriers') websites. They can't search in the data they created, so they have to pay ITA. The data is complicated and many-sourced. Fares and rules come out of ATPCO. Flights are separate from a different supplier. Seat availability is a massive collection of data morphing at 10 Hz, and it has nothing to do with whether seats are available. Then there is taxes and government fees which I think are now ATPCO, too. The timezone file I have seen at ITA still beats any other timezone collection I have ever seen. It's busy over there and the wires are glowing.
  - bogomipz 8y ago
    >"Not to mention almost all US based carriers and many others use ITA's flight search service to power their own (the carriers') websites. They can't search in the data they created, so they have to pay ITA." Can you say why aren't carriers able to search in the data they created without using ITA?
    - cracauer 8y ago
      Exactly. You have to realize the difference between a "pricing search" and a "low fare search", to use ITA terminology. A "pricing search" knows which specific flights it goes through and you just find the fares (keep in mind the carriers file like 600 fares for planes with 20 seats). The airlines could always do that. Before ITA came along in 2001 or so that is what you were waiting on in the travel agency while the agent tries different flight combinations by hand. "Low fare search" is also finding the flights. The carriers could not generally do that without ITA. There are exceptions such as Southwest which had a fare structure more like buses that kept the combinatorics down. But in addition to the immense amounts of fare and rule data that pile on your if you search 400 itineraries out * 400 back you also have the seat availability system. No carrier had (probably has) a system that can answer the amount of "seat" queries that a single low fare search causes. Keep in mind "seat availability data" has nothing to do with what seats are available. It is a high-frequency (10 Hz or whereabouts) way to turn fares on and off.
satvikpendem 8y ago
Paul Graham wrote about the advantages ITA had by using Lisp, interestingly enough. http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
- keithmcorbett 8y ago
  Fun fact: co-founders of ITA and Kayak were co-workers on the core product team at Interleaf. Paul Graham Worked at Interleaf in the consulting group. We all worked together on a major overhaul of Interleaf publishing software based on embedded Lisp. Interleaf 5 was about 10 years ahead of its time in many ways, and was eventually (mostly) crushed by lower cost competitors FrameMaker and (ugh) M$ Word. Paul brought some Interleafers into Viaweb.

man213 8y ago

https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml

mark_l_watson 8y ago
Thanks!, I had not seen the style guide. As someone else said, this probably comes from Google’s purchase of ITA. Common Lisp is stable, well documented, many fine implementations so I find it odd that there are only pockets of developers/companies who use it. Similar situation with Haskell.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Low popularity, meaning it's much more difficult to find employees proficient in it, making it a bad proposition for companies... which keeps it unpopular. The vicious cycle of fashion.
  - jackdaniel 8y ago
    If such vicious cycles were true no new programming language would gain adoption; after all even Java was "a new language" at some point of time.
    - lispm 8y ago
      What Java helped was the big pockets of SUN / later Oracle, because it was their language. Initially for small machines, it then helped them to sell lots of hardware into the 'enterprise' running slow (but portable) Java applications.
- cracauer 8y ago
  That guide is mostly what the reservation system used (now canceled). At the time of the merger QPX (the flight search) was ... diversely styled.
  - robert-brown 8y ago