New Architect: Orbitz Reaches New Heights with Lisp as its secret weapon. The takeaway here is that there are problems to solve that you just do not want to try to solve with any of the currently-popular languages. ITA is tackling an incredibly hard problem and using one of the right tools for the job. Functional languages may indeed yet gain popularity as the pressure to do tougher and tougher jobs increases. [It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again] [via Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

This story is important to me on a few levels.  Technically, I'm becoming more interested in functional languages, which I attribute to some time spent working on a DHTML/XSLT/Javascript based system early last year.  I find the claim that ITA programmers find Lisp to be a great productivity boost very enticing.  Now I wish that I'd learned more about functional and logic languages in college.  To think that I took a political science elective my last semester and missed out on the AI course.  And I got a C in the PoliSci course.  Grr...

The other is that Orbitz represents the only meaningful implementation of the long-threatened CRS bypass model, and since I work for a CRS, this is naturally interesting.  One difference between Galileo and Sabre is that Sabre has been actively trying to move off the mainframe since before I worked there in the mid 90's.  Galileo has until recently resisted attempts to move processing onto Unix or Windows boxes, though the recent announcement on the Unix based fares engine (I think that this was done at least partly in Prolog) and the Web Services project I'm on represent some meaningful moves away from the mainframe.

I met Jeremy Wertheimer in late 96 or early 97 at my previous job; he came by to demo ITA's engine.  He brought along something like a 200MHz Pentium desktop with 256 MB of RAM and proceeded to blow minds with the search capabilities they had then.  We never licensed it for a couple reasons: ITA doesn't integrate schedules with fares (just because there's a published fare doesn't mean you can purchase it), and they wanted a ton of money for their engine, which we didn't have.  Not that ITA isn't worth what they charge, an ATPCO feed (that's the feed that provides fare information) isn't cheap, and none of the CRSes can do what ITA does.