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Common Lisp Koans

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Re: Common Lisp Koans

#11
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did! Matrix.itasoftware.com

Oh, nice. It looks pretty fancy, too. I’m surprised that Google didn’t axe it in favor of Google Flights.

I suspect that branding is powerful, so it's better to keep an existing flight search running than to axe it in favor of something else and loose all the existing customers. Google bought ITA and kept matrix.itasoftware.com running with (presumably) the same branding; Booking Holdings bought Kayak and kept kayak.com running with the same branding.

Re: Common Lisp Koans

#12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic, but since I worked at Kayak let me expand a bit on its relationship to ITA as I understood it. Airlines and hotels had data about flights and available rooms. Kayak needed this data to show it in your search. This could happen in a few ways: 1. The airline or hotel could send Kayak data that had a particular format, and Kayak would deal with it. A common format, especially for hotels IIRC, was invalid csv…

Interesting! I wonder why ITA never offered a search engine themselves, if they had all the data aggregated. And boy do I love dealing with invalid CSVs... (especially ones that contain commas within the fields by accident)

[deleted]

Re: Common Lisp Koans

#14
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did! Matrix.itasoftware.com

Oh, nice. It looks pretty fancy, too. I’m surprised that Google didn’t axe it in favor of Google Flights.

The title of the site is "Matrix - ITA Software by Google". Also, on the site, they link themselves:

  Want to explore flights and get fast results?
  Try Google Flights
Almost seems like a deprecation notice...

Re: Common Lisp Koans

#15
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did! Matrix.itasoftware.com

Oh, nice. It looks pretty fancy, too. I’m surprised that Google didn’t axe it in favor of Google Flights.

There are some feature in matrix that flights didn't pick up. The original matrix site was even more powerful and exposed some operator-ishness, depending on what kind of account you were granted.

Re: Common Lisp Koans

#16
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/lispguide.xml

Thanks!, I had not seen the style guide. As someone else said, this probably comes from Google’s purchase of ITA. Common Lisp is stable, well documented, many fine implementations so I find it odd that there are only pockets of developers/companies who use it. Similar situation with Haskell.

That guide is mostly what the reservation system used (now canceled). At the time of the merger QPX (the flight search) was ... diversely styled.

Re: Common Lisp Koans

#17
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITA Software — the company that wrote the engine behind Orbitz, Kayak, etc. and now runs Google Flights — was acquired by them a while back.

Off topic, but since I worked at Kayak let me expand a bit on its relationship to ITA as I understood it. Airlines and hotels had data about flights and available rooms. Kayak needed this data to show it in your search. This could happen in a few ways: 1. The airline or hotel could send Kayak data that had a particular format, and Kayak would deal with it. A common format, especially for hotels IIRC, was invalid csv…

Not to mention almost all US based carriers and many others use ITA's flight search service to power their own (the carriers') websites. They can't search in the data they created, so they have to pay ITA.

The data is complicated and many-sourced. Fares and rules come out of ATPCO. Flights are separate from a different supplier. Seat availability is a massive collection of data morphing at 10 Hz, and it has nothing to do with whether seats are available. Then there is taxes and government fees which I think are now ATPCO, too. The timezone file I have seen at ITA still beats any other timezone collection I have ever seen. It's busy over there and the wires are glowing.

Re: Common Lisp Koans

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks!, I had not seen the style guide. As someone else said, this probably comes from Google’s purchase of ITA. Common Lisp is stable, well documented, many fine implementations so I find it odd that there are only pockets of developers/companies who use it. Similar situation with Haskell.

That guide is mostly what the reservation system used (now canceled). At the time of the merger QPX (the flight search) was ... diversely styled.

The Lisp Style Guide actually predates Google's acquisition of ITA. Common Lisp was used to develop some machine learning code. After the acquisition of ITA, the guide was extensively updated.

Re: Common Lisp Koans

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic, but since I worked at Kayak let me expand a bit on its relationship to ITA as I understood it. Airlines and hotels had data about flights and available rooms. Kayak needed this data to show it in your search. This could happen in a few ways: 1. The airline or hotel could send Kayak data that had a particular format, and Kayak would deal with it. A common format, especially for hotels IIRC, was invalid csv…

Not to mention almost all US based carriers and many others use ITA's flight search service to power their own (the carriers') websites. They can't search in the data they created, so they have to pay ITA. The data is complicated and many-sourced. Fares and rules come out of ATPCO. Flights are separate from a different supplier. Seat availability is a massive collection of data morphing at 10 Hz, and it has nothing t…

>"Not to mention almost all US based carriers and many others use ITA's flight search service to power their own (the carriers') websites. They can't search in the data they created, so they have to pay ITA."

Can you say why aren't carriers able to search in the data they created without using ITA?

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