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Comment by brlewis | Hacker News Reader

A tip I picked up from one of pg's essays for finding out what technology a company uses: look at their job listings; they don't lie.

In the "Operations" part of the company it appears you're right, "most work is in Python": http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167

In "Engineering", Lisp tops the "particularly valuable" list at the bottom of "Knowledge and Skills" for http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130

Farther down the same page they ask you to solve puzzles. "Puzzles submitted in C++, Lisp, Python, Java or Perl will be reviewed most promptly, because those are the languages we use every day"

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we should add ruby to that.

We really shouldn't.

If you (or someone else) wouldn't mind taking the time to explain it, I'd really like to know why your unsupported and vaguely anti-Ruby statement is so popular. I'm assuming that it means that the problems with Ruby are so widely known that you don't even need to spell them out in order for people to agree with you, but I guess I didn't get the memo. Why "really shouldn't" we? (Serious question - thanks.)

One thing, of all the dynamic languages the default Ruby implementation is by far the slowest. For anything that is slighty computational expensive, the default Ruby implementation is poor. Also think green, if you have lots of computation in a slow language, that easily adds up in a large data center in form of wasted electricity, which adds to cooling and is generally expensive. Some Ruby implementations try to get in the direction of, say, a Lisp implementation like SBCL - which is used by ITA. SBCL provides since quite some time a compiler that can generate reasonably fast code.

In Dan Weinreb's "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" talk he mentioned that SBCL was being used for QPX because of the quality of its compiled code (as I recall they started out with CMU CL so this was a natural choice).

For REs, Clozure CL was being used in part because faster compile times were more important and run time preformance was more than adequate; stateless business middleware is a very different beast than compute intensive route construction, where we can be sure the cutoff in optimizing choices is based on response time.

There were other reasons for Clozure CL, including the fact that it has a company behind it, one who's principles Dan and others have had long relationships with and ITA was buying one (man?)day a week of their services to support RES. SBCL is (has always been?) a volunteer effort.

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