Zed A. Shaw, Painter

If you ever want to know who to blame for nearly everything about Airline tickets sucking harder than a Dyson, read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html  It's Lisp. Lisp is why the airline can't fix a typo in your name on your ticket but instead has to give you a NEW ticket.

Keep in mind that what Carl is describing is pathetic if you consider what HFT coders do at a bank all day long, and bank coders are terrible shitty C++ hacks who mostly just know specialized math. The system is a memory mapped database that's shared across multiple machines FFS

So reading this thin description, they are basically creating a GASP 2 WHOLE GIGABYTES memory mapped file, processing flight graphs out of it, then ... somehow posting updates to this and shoving it out to a ton of shitty 800mhz linux boxes running lisp. Let's think:

1. WTF is up with Lisp coders and huge in-memory databases? If every time I hear about some high performance system and your language needs crazy mmap calls to work it, then your fucking language is broken.

2. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, we have companies like ... nearly every single one... that can process MASSIVE graphs of real time data, far beyond a pathetic 2 GIGABYTES in fractions of seconds not using Lisp or mmap janky ass home rolled DBMS.

3. They seem proud of this system and that it's written in Lisp, but every time I go to the damn Airport and need a clerk to help me I dread it because here comes the billions of key presses per-second just to find my fucking ticket through the fog of Sabre's Shit 1960s UI.

4. Every Lisp dude pulls out Sabre as a shining example of Lisp doing serious work, but in actuality there's a big ass chunk of C++ doing the real work. I'll bet $1000 that the Lisp could be rewritten in C++ (or anything) and be vastly superior. Lisp ain't magic.

Ultimately this is the same kind of bullshit I saw at banks. They raved about their CICS code that turned into a *printed* 10" stack of fan-fold paper b/c they used MAINFRAMES for serious transactions, meanwhile it's those MAINEFAMES that killed off the banks in 2008.