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Partially to spur conversation and partially because I don't remember the details of previous discussions, does ITA still use LISP?
by mindblink 15y ago
Partially to spur conversation and partially because I don't remember the details of previous discussions, does ITA still use LISP?
- tonfa 15y agoThey still list LISP in the job description for ITA.
- anonymoushn 15y agoWhen I interviewed there in early 2010 they still used LISP. They said it was mostly because their hires fresh out of MIT wanted to use it, so I don't know whether they will continue to use it now that their MIT kids will no longer want to use it...
- brlewis 15y agoScheme is no longer used in the introductory EECS course, but that doesn't mean there won't still be a lot of MIT grads hooked on the Lisp family of languages. (I think ITA uses Common Lisp.)
- pavelludiq 15y agoI imagine rewriting a large code base in any language to be very expensive, I doubt somebody can justify such an expense just because a bunch of new hires don't want to use a language. Companies don't rewrite java apps in lisp because a new of college grads don't want to use java.
- freehunter 15y agoNo matter how much I wish they would...
- pavelludiq 15y agoI can't say i disagree with BigCo on this one. If one wishes to use better languages the options are to switch jobs, start your own company or stay, but push to augment the existing codebase with other JVM languages. Clojure and Scala people have had some success starting skunkworks projects. But a complete switch? In most cases thats insanity. Companies have actually died trying to rewrite their apps from scratch. And even a slow gradual rewrite might take too long and be too expensive, not to mention not bringing any immediate benefits, because you're not adding new functionality and fixing existing bugs.
- lambda 15y agoI interviewed there recently, though decided to take another job. ITA uses Lisp for their core flight search engine, but uses other languages like Java and C++ for many of their other projects, such as the one mentioned in this announcement.
- lispm 15y agoITA developed the airline reservation's business logic in Common Lisp. They were using Clozure Common Lisp for that.
- zedr 15y agoFrom their homepage: http://itasoftware.com/careers/work-at-ita/ita-engineering.html http://itasoftware.com/careers/work-at-ita/ita-engineering.h... "We code in whatever language is best suited to the task, be it Lisp, C++, Java, Python, Perl, or XSLT."
- alec 15y agoI work at Google on flight search and was at ITA before that. We indeed continue to use Common Lisp. QPX, the flight search engine, uses SBCL.