While I'm not sure I buy the GP/GGP (can't see from the post window >_<) point that Google NEEDS a Lisp/CL team, I have a hard time imagining they would buy ITA for such a large sum of money only to piss off all the employees, and at the same time basically throwing away the tech if they wanted to rewrite it away from CL. The money is simply too much for doing that to make sense.

Unless they feel ITA's market position alone is worth that much cash, but I find that hard to believe.

edit: Bah wasn't in the same exact thread line but was mentioned, excuse the dumb on the grandparent/Great Grand Parent part.

But not Lisp.

Unlikely. ITA's codebase is probably really, really, really huge by now, and I get the impression that they consider their use of Lisp to be important to their success.

As others pointed out, there's already an existing code base. It's large, it works (solves hard problems) and it's scalable. There's also non-trivial C++ and Lisp integration, replacing Lisp FFI with Java JNI in some of these cases might not even work _at all_. ITA also does use Java, so Java integration is already there, to plug into Google's front/middle tier.

I imagine data persistence and distributed workloads are handled by the C++ portion of ITA code, which means plugging into GFS, BigTable, Chubby and more wouldn't be that difficult. ITA had already done the hard job of working around Common Lisp's missing pieces (a standard on concurrency and systems/network programming), something which would have been a huge distraction to e.g., Google in 2001 (when Ron Garrett attempted to evangelize Lisp).

Lastly, ITA isn't dependent on an acquisition by Google in the same way a start-up with no revenue (being acquired for talent and/or audience) would be. They're being bought partly for talent, but also they're being bought for actual technology and a working, profitable business. That gives them a lot more leverage in setting the terms of the acquisition (has e.g., Postini undergone a full re-write?). These issues is what "technical due diligence" is supposed to work out and resolve: would an integration necessarily mean driving the employees away? If this is so and such integration would have to occur, then the merger may simply not happen.

Even in the case of a pure talent acquisition care has to be taken to avoid an exodus. Money isn't going to the deciding factor here: I'd imagine ITA employees are less bound by golden handcuffs; they're not staring at life changing sums of money and (like most hackers) are more motivated by doing interesting work with smart peers and powerful tools, than by what is effectively a equivalent to a yearly bonus (I am assuming they're likely looking at $100,000-$200,000 in shares vesting over a four year period).

Can you expand on why you believe Google needs a Lisp team? I am having trouble coming up with any convincing argument for needing one.

Not at all http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

    The conversation went something like this:

    Me:  I'd like to talk to you about something...
    Him: Let me guess - you want to use Smalltalk.
    Me:  Er, no...
    Him: Lisp?
    Me: Right.
    Him:  No way.

    And that was the end of Lisp at Google.

You think Google doesn't already have people who know Lisp and would love to use it if they were allowed to? :)