and as a former ITA Software employee, i can scoff and say they aren't actually doing anything resembling flight search. they're just scraping websites and APIs. node.js might be fine for that, but so is anything else. at that level it's more a matter of preference than capability.
I ask because (1) the airline websites tend to be _really_ slow and (2) they tend not to find the cheapest/best flights - an ITA search can often beat them.
1) Part of our reason for using Node+Socket.IO is to deal with the problem of having a bunch of different sources returning data over a wide spread of time.
2) You'd be surprised about the airline sites. While they don't necessarily have the widest variety of good fares, airline will often reserve their cheapest fares for their own sites (called Last Seat Availability).
He's awesome, super talented and incredibly fun to work with.
It's more just an annoyance of the language. Specifically, anonymous functions are must easier in JavaScript, so it was just easier to write read and write maintainable code.
In Python, you are limited to only passing in simple lambda functions (although deferreds do get around this issue somewhat). It's not a show stopper but when combined with all the other advantages of Node.js, it just made the decision to switch a lot easier.
We also ran into a lot of issues related to poor garbage collection in Python and were using up a lot of memory. This was not related to dangling references but rather Python's permanent allocation of Integer and Float objects.
Finally, we just saw better performance out of V8 than Python (although we never tried anything else besides vanilla Python 2.6).
For our specific problem, Node.js worked well. It's not always the right solution. We will write a more detailed blog post soon with specifics of how we used Node.
That's pretty specious. You can easily write a function defined inside a function that you can pass by just naming it. "Anonymous" functions are just syntactic sugar. Furthermore, writing a new python named function is easier (fewer chars) to write than a javascript anonymous function, so the "sugar" gained is moot.
Finally, as you build more and bigger systems, you realize that those multi-line anonymous functions you had you actually want to be named (for documentation) and tested. So you'll end up de-anonymizing the complex (multi-line) ones anyway.
As for speed, why not compare a jit (v8) to a jit (pypy) ?
EDIT: This information does seem to be covered in the FAQ, but you don't see the link to the FAQ anywhere when you are trying to capture user accounts on initial signup: https://secured.milewise.com/faq
This is definitely an area for metrics and user testing, but probably better for us to err on the side of caution =)
Just a side note, but do you use some other collection API such as Yodlee or are you maintaining your own data scrapers for all the airline sites?
