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Common Lisp: Inside Sabre
bugbear writes "I just got permission from the author (Carl de Marcken of ITA Software) to publish this
email, which describes the inner workings of
Sabre, the flight search software that the airlines and travel agencies use. It
is a case study in cheap Linux/Intel, NT/Intel and Hpux boxes replacing mainframes, and also the use of lisp and other languages in a server-based app. Update: 01/16 13:45 GMT by H :RawDigits writes "Common Lisp: Inside Sabre - correction. The Lisp engine is used by Orbitz, and not Sabre. Sabre still maintains mainframe systems for their booking. I should know, I am sitting in the Orbitz NOC right now ;)"
The vast majority of language preferences reduce to religion, and of those the vast majority are dilettantes who know a dozen languages or fewer.
In reality, LISP isn't slow, and it really never was, compared to the alternatives. About 20 years ago, some deluded souls converted some heavily numerical FORTRAN code to LISP and found out it ran about 20% faster on LISP. I call them deluded because they were under the false impression that any of the detractors of LISP would care. They don't.
People prefer languages primarily for cultural reasons. LISP fits certain cultures and doesn't fit others. You can say the same about FORTRAN, C++, Java, Visual Basic, or any other language you like. Pseudo-quantitative arguments come later as justifications to be used in arguments.
Beyond that, different languages are good for different things, but it's almost impossible to have a discussion about it. If we were to have such a discussion, I would say that LISP is a great choice for anything involving graph theory, which a reservation system obviously does.
Me, I'm in the middle of writing a game engine and editor that's built in C and C++, does the plotting in an embedded Scheme, uses a Postscript-like code for run-time, interfaced with the Scheme, and under OSX uses Objective C for the user interface layer. So, what do I know anyway?