Having recently recommended Dan Weinreb's blog, I dropped by to see what he might have added. Besides the distress of discovering I called somebody "middle-aged" who's only a year older than I am, I found a post with some metrics describing just what his company, ITA Software, runs in Lisp. To wit:
I currently work at ITA Software, a.k.a “the 800-pound gorilla of Common Lisp”. If you use Orbitz and ask “how do I get from Boston to Chicago on 10/4/2000 at 2pm …”, we provide an excellent set of choices of the cheapest routes and fares for which seats are available. This program, known as QPX, is written in Common Lisp.
I am working on our new product, an airline reservation system. It’s an online transaction-processing system that must be up 99.99% of the time, maintaining maximum response time (e.g. on www.aircanada.com). It’s a very, very complicated system. The presentation layer is written in Java using conventional techniques. The business rule layer is written in Common Lisp; about 500,000 lines of code (plus another 100,000 or so of open source libraries). The database layer is Oracle RAC. We operate our own data centers, some here in Massachusetts and a disaster-recovery site in Canada (separate power grid).
I'm sure we can come up with a few examples in, say, the financial services arena. But overall, not many OLTP systems are harder-core than an airline reservation app.
Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.
Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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