

Google Said to Be in Talks to Acquire Travel Software Maker ITA  - fractional
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aJXdCOdgJmw4
Bloomberg is reporting that Google is in talks to buy ITA Software, in Kendall Sq. Cambridge.  The company makes travel management software and is one of the largest Lisp shops out there.<p>If GOOG buys them, will they force a rewrite in Python?  I'm under the impression that ITA funds a lot of development/creation of tools for Common Lisp, so what impact might that have on the Lisp ecosystem?
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gruseom
Nothing would happen to Lisp. A few people would keep using it and a lot of
people would keep arguing about it. Maybe Mahmud's right and there would be a
new diversity of real-world applications; that would be nice.

A more pressing question is what would happen to QPX, ITA's flight search
system. Google's policy of making acquired companies rewrite their software
according to Google's standards would, if applied, mean rewriting QPX in C++,
Java, or Python. Given how often QPX has been cited as a system that leverages
the power of Common Lisp to do complex things, that would be an interesting
thing to follow. I bet Google wouldn't do that, though. For an acquisition of
this size (the article says $1B), the rules are probably different. (Did they
rewrite Youtube?) I must say it would be neat to see Google break their no-
Lisp policy.

(As a side note, it's true that if you don't care that much about continuing
to evolve a complex Lisp system, it's often possible to rewrite it in a less
powerful language; you just end up with a larger and less changeable
codebase.)

~~~
sabya
Orkut.com is in .NET. Isn't it?

~~~
rbanffy
It was ported from .NET early on, as soon as it became too successful to
scale. They kept the .aspx URLs so links wouldn't be broken.

------
mahmud
A hundred Lisp startups would bloom. ITA is the blackhole of Lisp programmers;
a good chunk of them work there.

~~~
hga
It might be bad for Common Lisp; I can see a number of them switching to
Clojure. In his talk last year (NOTE, seems to be gone:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8>) Dan Weinreb gave Common Lisp
only about another 10 years and guessed that Clojure is the future of Lisp.

Which is my guess as well: Common Lisp is stuck in standardization amber prior
to it dealing with too many things that are critical today (concurrency and
network programming being the two biggest ones), Scheme is in a mess due to
the mess with R6RS and moves slowly. At least it moves, unlike CL, but it's so
slow there isn't even yet a standard for multidimensional arrays; at this
point I expect it to continue in its niches of education and language research
for a long time.

~~~
porlw
The main thing that attracts me to Clojure is the abundance of java libraries
and standard APIs and corresponding documentation available.

To do anything useful with common lisp I had to spend a lot of time
researching which CL supported which APIs, and stuff like GUIs and SQL weren't
standardised (or maybe they were, but finding implementations of the standards
was difficult).

Contrast this to my experience with Clojure, where I had a REPL running in a
text widget within an hour of starting to play. Sure, most of the code isn't
very Lisp-y ATM but then it's mostly direct library calls. As I learn more I
expect I will start using macros for things like GUI building (or perhaps
someone has already created a more natural clojure library for GUIs and I will
use that)

Being able to get started and productive immediately is a big win for Clojure
(and other JVM based languages). Even if you don't know much Java, there are
abundant tutorials and examples on pretty much any API that are relatively
simple to translate from Java to Clojure.

~~~
hga
Yes, both of the other Lisp communities have done an _awful_ job of the basic
blocking and tackling that's needed in the foundation to do most of the
interesting and useful work today. A big group like ITA's can get around that
with no problem, but it's too much of a pain for most individuals.

------
goatforce5
<http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch> is a very nice way of searching
for flights if you have specific/unusual requirements (eg, you want to do
mileage runs, or you want a weird routing to get a free stop over in an odd
location to visit family or friends). It's worth spending the time learning
their query syntax - shouldn't be an issue for any HN readers.

------
hga
It occurs to me that if Google is smart they'll take a hands off approach with
QPX. It's a service ITA runs for its customers and it's got to have some
pretty stiff service level guarantees. For a bunch of their customers, if it's
not up _their_ customers can't book flights (well, they could _book_ them, but
they couldn't find out which flights to book).

Google's infrastructure is just not up to this level. Customers with multi-
year contracts like Alitalia will be none too pleased if QPX's infrastructure
and code is mindlessly "Googlized" (well, Alitalia might be a bad example
given Google's problems with Italy, maybe they'll say "Nice airline you have
here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it." :-).

I can seem them doing the above, spinning off or ending QRES (a problem of bad
timing as I've noted elsewhere), and then doing interesting things with
various parts of QPX. At the very least ITA has a whole bunch of interesting
data feeds ... then again, I wonder what sort of contractual restrictions
there might be on them. Still, Google would be miles ahead by buying ITA and
only requiring negotiations instead of starting from scratch, i.e. not even
knowing what data feeds are out there until they hire domain experts. And then
there's capture and formatting and all that stuff, all already done in C++ by
ITA.

They could be buying ITA for its domain expertise plus its pile of crackerjack
programmers, the ones working on QRES wouldn't be pleased to be moved from
Common Lisp but that could beat the alternatives. Tough luck for the QRES
Oracle RAC people at all levels, but perhaps there's a good market for their
expertise (Microsoft sure had fun there when they screwed up with
Danger/Sidekick). And the QRES front end software is in Java (only the
middleware is in Common Lisp).

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Zak
I'm finding myself redirected to <http://preview.bloomberg.com> when I click
this link. I had to use the search box there to find the story. Anybody else
having issues?

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lispm
More rich Lisp hackers and lots of jobs for people rewriting Lisp to C++ (or
Java)?

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rabidgnat
"What happens to Lisp if Google buys ITA Software?"

Over the years, subsystems will get converted one-by-one to C++/Python/Java,
and programmers will get converted one-by-one to C++/Python/Java programmers.
Google would have a lot of good arguments for playing by the rules - they
would be able to leverage scalable computing and storage at scales ITA could
only imagine, and the rest will fall into place

------
sethg
Does ITA even use Lisp for its newer projects? None of the current job
postings in their engineering department mention Lisp.

~~~
hga
I suspect they have enough Lisp programmers for their needs at the moment.
They're hardly 100% Lisp:

The backend database of QPX is in C++ and loads half of a 32 bit address space
with route data, SBCL CL runs in the other half to figure out the "right
thing" which is complicated in more than one way (e.g. a good result is not
100 fares doing roughly the same thing all within a few dollars; see the talk
linked in the next paragraph).

The backend of QRES is Oracle RAC, the middleware is stateless and almost
almost entirely in Clozure CL, although Dan Weinreb mentioned in his talk
(NOTE, seems to be gone: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8>) that
one team was using something else (Java, I think). The front end is in Java
with a zillion web libraries.

They aren't Lisp fanatics ... I'm sure enough of them remember where that
attitude got Symbolics.

~~~
dfranke
They're still hiring Lisp programmers. I got a "mostly Lisp" job offer from
them a couple months ago but turned it down.

------
adityo
ITA uses Allegro Common Lisp, developed by Franz, if they wanted to rewrite in
something more palatable to Google maybe then <http://github.com/franzinc/cl-
python> could be the answer, maybe!!

~~~
plinkplonk
"ITA uses Allegro Common Lisp"

Unlikely, because then they would have to pay a percentage of their revenue to
Allegro in perpetuity. (Allegro has an insane revenue model
<http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml>)

~~~
gruseom
Yes, it's a throwback to a bygone era, pre-open-source. The Smalltalk vendors
shot themselves in the foot this way.

How can Franz not realize that they're guaranteeing their own obsolescence by
stubbornly sticking to that model? The new generation of Lisp hackers cross
them off the list immediately because of it. I don't get it. Perhaps they just
make enough money the old way and don't care.

~~~
hga
I seem to remember recently reading that they're looking for other ways to
make money besides selling ACL per se. Looking at their web site they most
prominently feature Semantic Web Technologies: <http://www.franz.com/>

