BIG successes of Lisp

[Ivan Toshkov]

prunesquallor at comcast.net wrote:
> mike420 at ziplip.com writes:
> 
> 
>>In the context of LATEX, some Pythonista asked what the big 
>>successes of Lisp were. I think there were at least three *big* 
>>successes.
>>
>>   a. orbitz.com web site uses Lisp for algorithms, etc.
>>   b. Yahoo store was originally written in Lisp.
>>   c. Emacs
>>
>>The issues with these will probably come up, so I might as well
>>mention them myself (which will also make this a more balanced
>>post)
>>
>>a. AFAIK Orbitz frequently has to be shut down for maintenance
>>(read "full garbage collection" - I'm just guessing: with
>>generational garbage collection, you still have to do full
>>garbage collection once in a while, and on a system like that
>>it can take a while)
> 
> 
> You are misinformed.  Orbitz runs a `server farm' of hundreds of
> computers each running the ITA faring engine.  Should any of these
> machines need to GC, there are hundreds of others waiting to service
> users.

Besides, when I read the description of orbiz, I was with the 
impression, that they prealocated the memory for just that reason: to 
remove the need for garbage collection.

-- 
Ivan Toshkov

email: first-name at last-name.org