Just FYI...

One of the goals of Parrot is to give any language running on it the capability of accessing functionality in libraries written in any other language. For example, a program written in Python could use CPAN modules written in Perl and libraries written in Lisp, presumably keeping a "native" python interface!

Now, as far as I'm concerned, such a thing is practically magic, but I do recognize that it has been done before, and the Parrot hackers are some very smart folks.

Stargate: Why simply beat a dead horse where it lay, when you can transport it anywhere in the universe?

exactly.

And the specs Carl cites in that article has grown by an order of magnitude - in both amounts of data and hardware power, as well as the complexity of the requirements.

True, I ignored the original point - generally C|C++ is going to be faster than LISP, if the algorithms necessary can be expressed in similar terms in each language. However, when it comes to having to constantly change the code to support constantly changing requirements, a dynamic language like LISP has a great advantage over C++.

That said, the code doing the searching for Orbitz uses algorithms and architectural techniques that would take so much more "scaffolding" in C++ that it would not only hamper maintenance of the code, it would likely hamper innovation and invention of new algorithms and functionality.

LISP is certainly not popular, and in many cases, not the best or most practical tool for the job... but it is alive and well, and will continue to be available to those who can/need to use it for the foreseeable future.

Perl became popular because it is very good at what it was designed to do - munging text with incredible flexibility and impressive speed - and it was the best available tool for the job when that ability was in high demand: the birth of the web.

Now, you can argue syntax ugliness all you want, I consider that subjective. However, when you begin to truly grok all of Perl's abilities, it's hard *not* to appreciate a fundamental beauty to the language.

I dare say, would you declare the German language a "monstrosity" because to American ears Deutsche has too many harsh-sounding words? Tell that to a German and he'll gladly smack you upside the head with a book of Goethe's poetry or perhaps the works of Wagner or Strauss!

Go read "Higher Order Perl" by Mark Jason Dominus and learn how to leverage Perl's features using the same techniques that LISP and ML programmers take for granted...

As a native speaker of Perl, I actually consider sigils and braces quite natural and beautiful.

Maybe this is overly pedantic, but I've seen it mentioned several times in various posts that "Orbitz is powered by LISP"

That's very true, but only one component of their back-end is actually written in LISP - the lowest-fare search engine.

Also, Orbitz did not write that component, called QPX - it was actually written by a company called ITA Software, who licenses it to dozens of other air-fare cross-shopping services.

Despite the other issues with Orbitz, QPX is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by highly skilled LISP programmers - an exceedingly fast, flexible, and successful search algorithm that they have been able to maintain as the industry leader since it's invention over twelve years ago.

As far as your assessment of "Orbitz is ridiculously slow for the amount of data it processes" I beg to differ. Having worked for ITA in the past, let me tell you the amount of data searched through is staggering, especially when you consider that that data set is updated continuously, in nearly-real-time (I could claim real-time, but I like being accurate)

Combine that data source with the fact that the queries sent can have dozens (and in some cases hundreds) of parameters, and various results can be filtered and modified arbitrarily based on rules imposed by the airlines and their sales partners (eg. Orbitz' negotiated fares for Airline X vs Airline Y, per flight/date/time/passengers/booking class etc etc etc) *and* that without a highly sophisticated approach to finding the best solutions the result set can have *billions* of possibilities....

Yeah... Orbitz' fare searching is pretty damned fast, considering.

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Did I ever mention that the slashdot posting filter is retarded?