[HN Gopher] Nubank acquires Cognitect
___________________________________________________________________
Nubank acquires Cognitect
Author : zrkrlc
Score : 500 points
Date : 2020-07-23 12:05 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cognitect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cognitect.com)
| rafaelferreira wrote:
| Nubank's co-founder and CTO offers his perspective:
| https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-nubank/
| hu3 wrote:
| > Clojure is and will remain open-source and Rich Hickey will
| continue to lead its efforts (as the BDFL).
|
| This is great! Languages need strong laser-focused vision to
| avoid becoming a soup of ideas.
| sidcool wrote:
| I am genuinely curious. I haven't heard the name Cognitect
| before. I checked the website and they seem like another software
| consultancy firm. Anything I am missing? HN is very picky, so
| they must be doing something special.
| [deleted]
| hvis wrote:
| This is the company that employs Rich Hickey and most of (all?)
| other maintainers of Clojure, the programming language.
| sidcool wrote:
| Ah. Makes sense. Thanks
| jfbaro wrote:
| I hope Nubank opens source DATOMIC... it would benefit a lot from
| community work.
| unexaminedlife wrote:
| "Explicitly constraining and mitigating certain categories of
| complexity was likely to pay off in the medium and long term."
|
| 100 million % correct. It boggles my mind when I am hired onto
| projects to help "bring them to prod" only to find out the past
| several years the coding was primarily done by college grads and
| relative beginners.
|
| Ideally you get to rely on experts for the entirety of a project,
| but if your budget doesn't allow for it, at minimum I think it's
| early in the project that you want EXPERTS. You don't bring in
| experts and expect miracles after all the bad decisions have
| already been made and committed to.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| AWS has Quantum Ledger DB, which is a lot like what nubank
| architected on top of datomic.
|
| Anyone know what language qldb is built on ?
| praveenperera wrote:
| First plataformatec (company behind elixir) now this.
| Interesting.
| tom_b wrote:
| Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help
| Rich's retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-
| so-insider joke here)
|
| I have had the pleasure of "using Clojure in anger" and for a few
| years was very dedicated to learning how to use it effectively.
| This was a significant step up for my general programming skills
| and the simplicity of the language often saved me from myself
| with respect to bad design or choices in code. Whatever
| programmer "maturity" I can claim is probably due to Clojure and
| teaching introductory programming and databases (not with Clojure
| and Datomic to be clear).
|
| This acquisition is more abstractly interesting to me in that a
| _VERY_ dedicated Clojure /Datomic company made it. We didn't see
| here, for lack of a better example, a FAANG company grabbing
| Cognitect. That may have been a choice! Maybe Cognitect went with
| an acquisition where they retain a high degree of autonomy with
| the benefits of being acquired.
|
| I never made the leap into a larger organization with Clojure at
| its core. I was able to use Clojure only in my small shop where I
| have a small degree of autonomy on development language choice.
| For a few years, I was somewhat actively seeking an opportunity
| to join a larger Clojure-oriented team but struggled to gain much
| traction when applying to openings. It seems possible to build a
| Clojure career, but I've not been very good at that.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| (for anyone who doesn't get it, Rich funded Clojure development
| via his retirement savings from 2005 until he ran out in 2009
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321)
| gdsdfe wrote:
| Oh wow! I didn't know that
| [deleted]
| swyx wrote:
| gotta ask - what did he do after 2009? is he alright now?
| dkersten wrote:
| He did a community drive in 2009/2010 or so and a lot of us
| pitched in a little. Then he joined forces with Relevance
| to create Cognitect and that has funded his Clojure
| development since. Hopefully he gets a nice payday from
| this acquisition too.
| puredanger wrote:
| He became the CTO of Cognitect. :) He's doing great.
| systems wrote:
| Since Nubank, is not in the business of selling software does
| this mean, they might open source datomic ?
| gdsdfe wrote:
| Anyone have an idea on the nubank stack in a bit more details?
| riadvargas wrote:
| Here you can get a somewhat updated view on Nubank's stack:
| https://stackshare.io/nubank/nubank
| scribu wrote:
| Did anyone else notice that the biggest non-academic supporters
| of functional programming seem to be financial institutions?
|
| Is it due to the nature of the problem space? Is it because
| finance people tend to be more analytical? Something else?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Never discount networking effects. I think it's good for the
| problem, but better languages are better for all problems, so
| that doesn't explain it enough.
|
| Considering that finance is decently geographically
| distributed, I'd say it's more SV has become javascript hell
| than finance is especially FP oriented.
| gphil wrote:
| I think the answer to both of your questions is yes. I think
| the related concepts of immutability and pure functions without
| mutable state allow for cleaner analytical modeling (and in
| some cases in strong functional languages, mathematical proof)
| of what that the code is actually going to do in production.
| That kind of predictability is essential for dealing with
| financial computations.
| nolok wrote:
| I would assume it's because it's easier to provide a
| mathemathical proof for the code with functionnal programming.
| orolle wrote:
| It is nature of the problem space which requires you to produce
| high quality code. If you have a small error in your program,
| the financial market participants will use it against you to
| profit. What you loose, others win! Google "fat finger" for
| examples. In banking you have to keep track of every
| transactions, see "double accounting". You never delete a
| transaction, you only retract! Mutablity can cause you a lot of
| trouble there. SQL DELETE and UPDATE are extremly dangerous!
| Clojure and datomic solves this through immutibilty. Lastly
| time is relativistic, meaning that every IT system has a
| slightly different time. Normaly you never notice this. But
| they are the cause of tricky race conditions and cost you real
| money. Think about bank transactions, where you have a
| transaction date (date you send money) and valuta date (date
| your friend receives money). One transaction 2 different dates,
| depending which perspective you take (perspective is
| relativistic, Einstein is right even in IT!). Datomic
| linerialies transactions thus this problem does not occure on
| database level.
| moon2 wrote:
| Not really a Clojure user, but I made a small API with it
| once and it blew my mind, especially the design patterns
| involved. An interesting one is the ports-and-adapters
| (a.k.a. hexagonal architecture) [1][2] . Basically, all the
| business logic will be kept at a layer, and all of the
| functions there should be pure (i.e. they will always return
| the same information according to your input, and these
| functions won't cause side effects [3]). Then you would have
| layers where you can plug databases and REST handling.
|
| And Nubank take testing really seriously. REPL and pure
| functions makes it very easy to use TDD.
|
| [1] https://github.com/nubank/basic-microservice-
| example#ports-a...
|
| [2] http://wiki.c2.com/?PortsAndAdaptersArchitecture
|
| [3] https://practicalli.github.io/clojure/thinking-
| functionally/...
| alexbanks wrote:
| > It is nature of the problem space which requires you to
| produce high quality code.
|
| Would love to see any actual data or studies showing that
| functional programming implicitly produces "high quality
| code".
| beders wrote:
| https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/10/221326-a-large-
| scale-...
|
| Section 3, RQ1
| alexbanks wrote:
| I have quite a few gripes with this article, and overall
| question the validity of its assertions, but interesting
| nonetheless.
| amw-zero wrote:
| There's a ton of problems with empirical studies about
| software in general. Very hard to conduct reliable
| experiments. In particular, I think analyzing public
| GitHub projects is pretty much the worst corpus possible.
|
| For example, almost all of the projects in this study are
| infrastructure projects (I'm not familiar with all of
| them so I can't say that it's definitely all). I'm much
| more interested in application projects, and even if you
| (general you) aren't, you have to admit that an
| infrastructure project has a totally different set of
| characteristics than your average business application.
|
| I think anything we can do to get more empirical data
| related to software the better, as we have devolved into
| strong personalities and conviction making pretty much
| all of the major decisions in our industry, which is
| really deeply sad. But we have to do better than just
| mining open source Github projects.
| alexbanks wrote:
| Yeah, I wasn't necessarily trying to get into an argument
| with the person who responded, but there's so many
| factors not being accounted for in that study that it
| might as well be measuring nothing at all.
|
| Choosing Github projects and measuring defects on them
| has almost nothing to do with the quality of closed-
| source code (as we were discussing, functional
| programming languages in the wild). I also briefly
| started down the path of mapping that study's
| measurements to overall language popularity (as I think
| they're related - more C++ code available = more bugs),
| but gave up as I remembered that A.) Nobody's opinion
| changes as a result of a reasonable argument on the
| internet, and B.) Convincing this person nets me nothing
| at all.
|
| You get higher quality code by hiring people capable of
| producing higher quality code. A great way to find people
| that are capable of producing higher quality code is by
| hiring for languages with extremely small talent pools -
| nobody got there because it was easy or the odds of
| getting hired were good. Functional programming might
| seem popular on HN, but in the wild is really not popular
| at all. Clojure developers probably care a great deal
| more about the quality of their work than, say, some
| random J2EE developer, as the Java dev might not care at
| all about anything other than staying employed.
|
| I guess my argument summarizes down to "Functional
| programmers care more about their work", which, to my
| original point, has nothing at all to do with the
| languages they're using (as the person I responded to was
| saying). To assert that "Functional programming languages
| produce higher quality code" is like saying "This brand
| of hammer hammers better." It's just nonsense.
| darthrupert wrote:
| That's unfortunately hard to find, since hardly any
| customers require that these days. Fast and cheap is where
| it's at.
| alexbanks wrote:
| Or, as I'm asserting, it's just totally bogus.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > It is nature of the problem space which requires you to
| produce high quality code.
|
| Wouldn't a strongly-typed language be a better choice here?
| in9 wrote:
| I wouldn't think that strong types are an advantage. They
| may be in classic software with long compile times and
| complex builds. However, the current landscape for
| financial institution doesn't require that. Immutability
| and functional paradigms seem to be much more in line with
| the needs of the business.
| orolle wrote:
| I do not think so. The regulation is constantly changing
| and the meaning of names change frequently. Thus a
| "Verified Account" can mean different things over the
| years. The problem with types and object orientation is,
| that the names used in the domain diverge from the name
| used in source code (class name, types). Think about a
| class diagram with class names relating to each other. To
| represent the domain language better, you need to change a
| lot in a class diagram. Dynamic languages reduce the
| problem, as a lot less names are needed. Clojure spec is
| used for specification of data instead of types, but there
| is also clojure typed (which uses javas type system).
| maximente wrote:
| this is perhaps controversial but i actually think datomic
| is so powerful, it's worth using clojure for. in other
| words, the database is driving the choice of programming
| language.
|
| the idea of viewing a database as an _immutable_ state of
| the world at a given instant t0, and time becoming a
| parameter on that state of the world (in order to show
| changes as time goes forwards [or backwards!]), is
| extremely, extremely attractive for things like finance,
| whose first class citizens are among others:
|
| - capability for audits e.g. show me the history of
| transactions from any particular account. since datomic is
| basically a collection of immutable facts over time, this
| is "free"
|
| - distributed computing - datomic runs nicely across your
| own internal compute (often needed for financial stuff)
|
| - transactions are no longer strings, but are actual data
| structures - this makes the gnarly steps of things like
| transferring assets across instruments a lot easier (i'd
| imagine). think about how you'd implement a shopping cart
| with transactions in postgres vs. how you'd do it with
| access to raw data structures
| fnordsensei wrote:
| Moreover, transactions are reified and can have arbitrary
| metadata, so you can query the transaction log itself
| (for example, "show me all transactions issued by person
| X").
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| It takes the will and discipline to use it, but what
| Clojure Spec (and other schemata libs) offer is, in a lot
| of ways, more powerful and flexible than traditional type
| systems. A spec can be thought of more as a contract with
| the data, one with enough detail that it can be used to
| auto-generate conformant example data even. If, for
| instance, you have a function, that needs to work on
| either, integers, or numeric strings, and textual fractions
| like '1/5'. Enforcing this constraint on input, and getting
| informative exceptions on bad data is easy with a spec, and
| the function code does not need to contain all of the noise
| to validate or coerce data. Sure, you don't see the problem
| at compile time, but if you can auto-generate test data,
| the tests that you should already have become easier to
| write.
| beders wrote:
| Unlikely. At least not for domain modeling.
|
| Especially in that industry where your domain is changing
| all the time, where regulations are changing all the time,
| where the ability to reason about your domain at different
| points in time is essential.
|
| Having more flexible types like maps is one of the building
| blocks to avoid complexity (there are more, more important
| ones) It sounds counter-intuitive, but it certainly is
| working out for companies embracing clojure.
| socksy wrote:
| I love immutability and Datomic as much as the next Clojure
| programmer. But this sounds quite a lot like post-hoc
| reasoning.
|
| For example, there's quite a few situations where you require
| mutability in bank data (e.g. with government requirements,
| or when you want to rollback fraudulent trading). Sure, both
| are solvable with Datomic, but they don't scream "huge
| advantage with an immutable datastore".
|
| And there are plenty of highly competitive industries where
| code quality matters, but they're not flocking to functional
| programming.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I think functional programming is an
| absolutely great way to structure and think about programming
| (and have coded professionally in Clojure for the last 5
| years or so). But I suspect the prevalence of FP in some
| industries is as much chance/social reasons than it is for
| some inherit superiority in the approach.
| polityagent wrote:
| small note: Banks do not want to forget fraud, the rollback
| would be akin to a git revert. Even if the history
| presented to the customer makes the fraud vanish it won't
| be forgotten by the bank.
|
| With government requirements I'm assuming you mean
| something like gdpr. Datomic supports actually removing
| data via excision. it's just not the default behaviour. I
| personally prefer a system that doesn't forget by default
| whilst preserving the option to do so.
|
| you can also support destruction of personal data via other
| means such as key shredding.
| galkk wrote:
| Aren't "rollbacks" done as separate transactions, that
| return account amount to Previous value?
| socksy wrote:
| Depends on the legal requirements of that rollback
| dig1 wrote:
| Mainly because of the problem space. Banking/finance is a
| complex field with many moving parts: card processing,
| validation, encryption, currency exchange and tons of
| certification stuff (I believe Nubank's primary focus is card
| processing). Didn't even touch other financial fields like
| investing, credit handling, or any kind of trading.
|
| The software is always expected to be correct, never fail and
| fast. Otherwise, someone will lose the money, and usually, you
| (bank or institution) will have to recoup that, plus penalties,
| plus name damage.
|
| Source: worked there.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Doesn't banking actually use double accounting to ensure not
| losing money instead of relying on something as brittle as
| software?
|
| Then again, Wirecard happened. But perhaps that wasn't
| exactly banking.
| pea wrote:
| In haskell, a lot of the uptake in financial services is
| because they are writing internal DSLs to do things like
| modelling exotic options.
| dwwoelfel wrote:
| As a counter example, Stripe uses Ruby and Mongo.
| Joe8Bit wrote:
| Immutability is a very powerful idea when record keeping and
| dealing with transactions. I know of at least one major bank
| whose ledgers are written Haskell.
| bhurlow wrote:
| any relevant links to share about this?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Perhaps: Standard Chartered Singapore?
|
| I tried unsuccessfully to get a job with them about 4-5
| years ago. They are a huge Haskell shop.
| davidrupp wrote:
| Sounds like a broken hiring process right there. Anything
| you care to share about why that didn't work out? I can't
| imagine a company having an opportunity to hire you and
| choosing not to.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I don't mind sharing about that. Standard Charter has the
| reputation for being a great Haskell shop and I have been
| trying for years to up my Haskell skills.
|
| I simply didn't have enough background in Haskell. The
| interview was fun. The interviewer did his PhD in Haskell
| and compiler theory.
|
| Around the same time, I applied to Facebook's Haskell
| group, and I got to interview with Simon Marlow, which
| was great. He also said that I didn't have enough Haskell
| experience and suggested that I do more Haskell
| consulting work, and re-apply in a year.
|
| Anyway, I love coding in Haskell but my skills need
| improvement.
| niclo wrote:
| It's Walmart and not a financial institution but this is a
| great talk about immutability applied to the backend
| services using F#: https://youtu.be/FskIb9SariI
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Coincidentally, Walmart also maintains a lot of clojure
| libraries now, including the go-to graphql implementation
| in clojure: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia
| dgb23 wrote:
| Functional languages and databases seem to be a natural fit.
|
| Given you have a basic grasp of bookkeeping, accounting and
| financial statements: Would you rather program these things in
| a functional or imperative language? Would you rather store the
| transactions in a accreting, value oriented database or one
| that has no inherent notion of these concepts?
|
| Or more generally, if your application has a temporal reporting
| feature, then you need to be able to ask questions like: "What
| were these values at date X and what are they going to be at
| Y?" etc.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Good for them, well deserved success for the principles, Clojure,
| and Datomic!
|
| I donated to the Clojure dev fund early on, and I had two
| consulting customers over a few year period who mandated Clojure.
| I stopped using Clojure when the paid work stopped because I
| really like Common Lisp better for my use cases. I have on my
| radar for sometime this year to update my cooking website [1]
| that is written in Clojure, so I will at least get a small
| opportunity to kick the tires on modern day Clojure.
|
| [1] http://cookingspace.com
| jacknews wrote:
| Will the license change?
| puredanger wrote:
| No change in Clojure's license (it is still EPL 1.0).
| adelarsq wrote:
| No. It's just a "cooperation" to use technologies.
| ksec wrote:
| I thought Nubank was an Elixir Shop but now It looks like Nubank
| is a much bigger Clojure shop than Elixir.
|
| So why did they acquire Plataformatec?
| kureikain wrote:
| They are a big Clojure shop. They hire Plataformatec as a
| consulting company. This podcast has more info:
| https://changelog.com/podcast/402
| riadvargas wrote:
| We (Nubank) actually acqui-hired Plataformatec earlier this
| year: https://www.contxto.com/en/startups/fintech-nubank-
| acqui-hir...
| huahaiy wrote:
| Congratulations! Does this mean that there is a chance for
| Datomic to be open sourced?
| josefrichter wrote:
| Killer team.
| tomconnors wrote:
| It sounds like Nubank might have the biggest Datomic installation
| in the world (2000 servers). This is exciting news for people
| like me who think Datomic is the most interesting database out
| there. Putting more resources behind Datomic might finally allow
| it to go mainstream.
| tom_b wrote:
| I was unable to bring Datomic in-house. Mainly because our
| organization has a huge agreement with Oracle and all our
| database servers are essentially "free" to teams.
|
| So I cheated. I created some schema designs that were
| immutable. I added a GUID, timestamp, and a deleted flag (value
| of 'Y' or 'N') to tables. Basically, all selects are against
| views that are defined over the tables to select the tuple
| associated with the max(timestamp) for that tuple along with
| the tuple having a deleted flag value of 'N'. This means that
| any select only sees the most recent tuple value for a GUID if
| it hasn't been "deleted".
|
| There was a little bit more hiding in there to handle dirty
| writes.
|
| But this worked very well for my requirements. By really only
| doing inserts, I was able to do similar "point in time" looks
| at the db as an immutable value.
|
| Fun stuff.
| havenconnect wrote:
| Would you be willing to have an email chat about that? I'm
| thinking about doing a similar strategy with our relational
| database and wanted to get your experiences with that.
|
| sam at havenconnect dot com
| escherize wrote:
| Reminds me of the time I wrote an eavt (entity, attribute,
| value, transaction-time) store on top of rethink db with a
| friend of mine.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| You may want to look into Anchor Modeling
| http://www.anchormodeling.com/
| rel2thr wrote:
| Wonder if this makes datomic more likely to become free/open
| source
|
| Not sure what their license revenue is but hard to imagine it
| would be significant to a major fintech
| kamaal wrote:
| Also lets hope they acquire cursive ide too and offer it for
| free.
|
| Clojure deserves an IDE for larger adoption.
| puredanger wrote:
| Clojure has many free IDEs. Many people currently use Emacs
| w/CIDER, Atom w/Chlorine, Visual Studio w/Calva, Vim
| w/Fireplace, etc. For that matter, Cursive also has a free
| non-commercial edition.
| jcadam wrote:
| I've found CIDER superior to Cursive for Clojurescript,
| specifically. I use a combination of IntelliJ (with the
| emacs keybindings) and emacs depending on which language
| I'm working with. Most of my projects involve two or more
| languages, so I'll usually have both editors open all day
| :)
|
| As an aside, I'm starting to become a fan of Kotlin for
| backends (with some Clojure sprinkled in where it offers a
| big advantage), and Clojurescript (re-frame) for the
| frontend (because it offers a big win over javascript
| there). I've taken a step back from full Clojure for
| everything, being that I have to work with others who
| aren't as in to "alternative" languages as I am.
|
| Datomic is something I probably won't mess with until (and
| if) it becomes open source.
| randompwd wrote:
| Using Spring with Kotlin or other?
| jcadam wrote:
| Yea, spring boot. When 90% of what you're doing on the
| backend is gluing a bunch of different Java technologies
| together, Clojure becomes hard to justify. Fortunately,
| mixing JVM languages together on the same project isn't a
| big deal so you can bring in some targeted Clojure where
| needed.
|
| Kotlin is great because it's the closest thing to a
| general-purpose Java replacement I've seen. The interop
| support between Kotlin and Java is outstanding.
| KingMob wrote:
| Funny, I _left_ Cider for Cursive a few years ago,
| because back then, Cursive had the better cljs support.
| jcadam wrote:
| It's probably a result of my using shadow-cljs rather
| than figwheel. Cursive will catch up eventually, I'm
| sure.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| Are there any screen casts out there showcasing the
| utility of CIDER? I guess I have just never been a big
| emacs guy so it felt sort of clumsy to me but I am
| probably just missing something. Could also be that I am
| just too familiar with the Cursive workflow.
| kamaal wrote:
| Thanks Alex.
|
| Wishing you and your team many congratulations and kudos on
| this occasion.
| LandR wrote:
| ItelliJ w/Cursive too works great.
| kgwxd wrote:
| There's a free non-commercial license. If that's not enough,
| wouldn't they have to acquire IntelliJ too since they have a
| similar licensing model?
| jyriand wrote:
| What is meant by "joining"? Did Nubank aquire Cognitec?
| josefrichter wrote:
| yes
| juskrey wrote:
| Pretty strange how no one else sees that banks are very very
| fragile institutions, plus this one is heavily VC-ed, which makes
| everything they claim in public irrelevant (this is if we want to
| trust what any bank says at all).
|
| What is relevant is that Cognitect will now have 100% of income
| coming from the single (and fragile) source, they now do not have
| to compete and survive on their own, they can't say "no" when
| having a choice between having to conform or quit the only money
| source.
|
| I am not discussing personalities here - people are free to
| choose how to sell their products or themselves. Just thinking
| what this means to me as a software consultant who makes 100% of
| money from Clojure (yes, a fragile single choice because of sort
| of falling in love)
| whoisjuan wrote:
| How is a bank a fragile institution? Banks are the most heavily
| insured and protected institutions in any modern country.
|
| In the US for example, banks not only contribute to federal
| insurance but also have built joint private reserves to weather
| economic turmoil. In the modern world banks rarely go bankrupt
| because if they did that would tank any confidence in the
| economy and create incredible chaos.
|
| Even in failed states like Venezuela banks are still a major
| pillar of economy confidence.
| juskrey wrote:
| This is simply false - banks are not insured against failure
| and not protected unless some political move "too big to
| fail" is made, and this only makes systemic financial system
| failures worse.
| jwr wrote:
| Whether this is false depends on particular country laws.
| For example in the EU you can't call yourself a "bank"
| without being subject to regulation, and in Poland for
| example, if you are a "bank", your money is actually
| protected against failure, up to EUR100,000.
| juskrey wrote:
| Deposits insurance has nothing to do with that.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| > Banks are not insured against failure and not protected.
|
| Well. Except they are. In the US not only at the federal
| level but also at the state level:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance
|
| - https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_C
| orp...
|
| - https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-
| defaul...
| cemerick wrote:
| You are mistaking what is insured here. _Deposits_ are
| insured, the banks themselves are not.
|
| Here's the list of banks that have failed in the US and
| for which their deposits entered receivership managed by
| the FDIC; looks like a handful every year:
| https://www.fdic.gov/Bank/individual/failed/banklist.html
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I'm not. I was trying to point to the OP that banks
| aren't as fragile as he think they are. When the very
| nature of your business, which is handling people's
| money, is federally insured, you have mitigated a lot of
| risk.
|
| Yes banks can fail and they can go bankrupt, and if that
| happens to Nubank then this acquisition goes to hell
| which makes the Clojure ecosystem weaker. I give that to
| OP.
|
| But saying that banks are "very very" fragile
| institutions I think is fundamentally wrong.
| raphaeljlps wrote:
| Just to clarify, Nubank is not an actual/formal bank in
| Brazil. They have operating licenses as Financial institution
| and Payment institution though.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Nubank raised nearly a billion $ since 2018, hard to see that
| being bad in any possible way for Datomic to have access to
| those resources
| juskrey wrote:
| That billion is not a charity, but comes with some people
| pursuing some things. Most of the time that "things" are to
| make a PR stunt, inflate and sell.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| With respect, I see where you are coming from, but would argue
| it isn't necessarily the right read, either in terms of banks,
| or in terms of Clojure, though there is nuance.
|
| Banks are systemic actors in the financial system. They have
| privileges granted only to them, requirements that only they
| have to meet. It is HARD to build and operate a bank, whether
| in the US or in another country.
|
| From a "fragility" perspective- there are a lot of definitions
| of fragility, but when looking at attributes like- may fail at
| any time; may lose customer assets; may take on inappropriate
| risks given their systemic position; have negative systemic
| impact on larger financial system operations- whatever
| attributes you think of, the amount of energy that goes into
| oversight around those attributes is significantly larger for
| banks than any other "systemic" industry (real estate, health,
| whatever).
|
| The number of health oversight agencies in the US is, like, 5.
| The number of financial oversight agencies is in the dozens,
| just at the federal level. (This is why in the US you sue for
| medical malpractice but not financial malpractice, and why
| there is government backed financial insurance of various kinds
| and much less health insurance. You are on your own in the
| health industry. In finance there are armies around).
|
| Banks have like 10 different kinds of risk that they and their
| supervision are monitoring for. Yes, banks fail, but that's
| because people suck and are bad at things and the second law of
| thermodynamics and so forth. It isn't necessarily the same in
| other countries but banking, like many other industries, is
| increasingly global, and banking core systems are increasingly
| international.
|
| Nubank is clearly doing a LOT of things right- I saw a
| presentation in person from them in February and it blew my
| mind the level of capability and abstraction they were working
| at. They are a solid entity with a strong growth path.
|
| Cognitect, in contrast, is a tiny consulting firm. Maybe 50
| employees? Technical consulting at scale is an incredibly hard
| business, particularly when your solution domain is limited to
| a particular toolchain. There was really no chance Cognitect
| was ever going to become Thoughtworks, or Deloitte, or anyone
| like that. That's an infinitely more fragile financial
| situation for Clojure than living under the roof of a business
| with a valuation in the billions.
|
| The way to think about this is that all technologies have a
| sponsor. Clojure moves from basically being sponsored by a guy
| in his backyard to, like PHP (Etsy has a market cap of around
| $10B and employs the PHP leader). That's huge.
|
| Beyond that, having what should become a more well known and
| reputable player in the financial industry backing it- you
| could well see A LOT MORE adoption from enterprises playing
| copycat. It's not going to happen right away, but it is a
| seminal step in COMPLETELY changing the enterprise adoption
| calculation.
|
| However, everything is a tradeoff. If you aren't working with
| Datomic, or in finance- this move is a stronger statement that
| maybe Clojure doesn't have the strongest future for you. It
| isn't going to become a lot of other things that it could
| become. The finance industry has a fondness for languages with
| weird syntax, and those languages often stay in the finance
| industry niche. That's probably where Clojure stays. There are
| all sorts of wicked cool JVM things like LMAX and Azul that are
| also financial industry specific, and Clojure and Datomic get
| to become one of those. Very successful, very cool, but niche.
|
| Anyway- hope that's helpful, happy to continue the
| conversation.
|
| Cheers.
| juskrey wrote:
| I have no issues with financial things per se - I have built
| several financial systems (from crypto to funds management)
| with Datomic and Clojure myself.
|
| And this is also one of the reasons I think having sole bank
| as your owner is a really really bad thing.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Say more? Would be helpful for others to further articulate
| your observations and opinions. No one has all the answers.
| For all who have a stake a full diversity of views is best.
| juskrey wrote:
| I'll be really short: the bank lends money in Brazilian
| real to credit card holders and, in addition, keeps half
| of that in financial derivatives. The last real slide (3x
| in value) was in 2011-2016. Current world situation is..
| interesting, to say at least, and 1 billion of VC money
| are not charity.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Ah, yes, got it, that's helpful.
|
| Are their financial reports available and published in
| English? Would be interesting to read.
|
| I don't know details of their financial model, but will
| say:
|
| * there is a long bootstrap process for a bank that
| involves being selective with what customers they can
| serve with what products at what margins in what order
|
| * debt is a hard game, though in many niches now is the
| best of times
|
| * currency is also a hard game
|
| * in general, banks are valued at a small multiple of
| assets and do not attract VC
|
| * in general, SAAS businesses are valued at a large
| multiple of revenue and do attract VC
|
| So my assumption would be that they are using equity to
| build the ability to get into the banking core business
| as a SAAS, which is both lucrative and exploding as an
| opportunity (see recent nCino news). If they succeed,
| that's an extremely durable business, and not a bad place
| for Clojure to be. There are a number of languages that
| still only "exist" because they form the basis of a
| banking core.
|
| Cheers. Thanks for the engagement.
| mapgrep wrote:
| "If you aren't working with Datomic, or in finance- this move
| is a stronger statement that maybe Clojure doesn't have the
| strongest future for you."
|
| I don't follow. The company the python BDFL last worked for
| was a storage outfit with a valuation roughly equal to
| Nubank. The Rails BDFL is at a pretty small software shop in
| Chicago. Ruby BDFL was at a division of Salesforce last I
| checked.
|
| Seems a bit reductive to say that Clojure creator being
| employed by a bank makes Clojure a worse choice outside
| finance.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Sure, reductive is fair. In response:
|
| a. ruby and especially python (and PHP for that matter) are
| top 15 languages with very wide adoption, following, name
| recognition, use cases. Great documentation, lots of books,
| conferences, blogs. Robust business and consulting
| ecosystem. etc. Lots of onramps and growth curves for
| individuals. And communities still growing steadily.
| Clojure is substantially younger (10 years vs 30 for py, 25
| for php and ruby) but it is comparatively tiny and niche
| and arguably its _rate_ of growth is lower
|
| b. syntax is part of the story here. Clojure is a better
| language than kotlin, but kotlin is seeing explosive
| general purpose use case growth that Clojure can only dream
| about. Clojure _syntax_ is niche.
|
| c. there are a very large number of technologies, including
| languages, that have wide usage within finance and banking
| and zero use outside. No matter how neat k is, there is no
| market for tutorials, no community growth (well, maybe
| modulo data sci world). No one is ever going to use jbase
| rather than postgres. Many of these also have niche syntax.
|
| d. I think the Nubank news on balance is terrific, but I
| don't think it helps Clojure's community growth story at
| all, which is a chicken/egg problem in the context of
| general purpose use outside of finance. Nubank committing
| to _that_ outcome...seems doubtful to me, compared to
| Nubank wanting to have more control over what it considers
| to be its strategic differentiator.
|
| This last could well be wrong, and what we'll get from
| Nubank-owned Cognitect is developer experience, onboarding,
| a completed Spec, a comprehensible REPL-based developer
| onboarding, _error messages_ , documentation- all the UX
| things where Clojure's superior design ergonomics are
| undone by nits in the experience.
|
| My understanding is that Nubank is concerned about these
| things for its internal people, that their hiring rate has
| forced them to solve for onboarding. We will see. The
| Clojure team itself likes the sharp tools for experts
| model. There would need to be a funded change in that
| emphasis for the acceptability of Clojure solutions in
| areas where it wasn't already known to grow.
| kinleyd wrote:
| An excellent assessment - Rich, Stu and team clearly must
| have assessed the option similarly. Congratulations to
| Cognitect and here's wishing them well.
| latortuga wrote:
| Cognitect is not winding down Datomic, Datomic Cloud, or
| Datomic consulting, and they have big name customers including
| Facebook and Netflix.
| qroshan wrote:
| Yeah, very strange for a bank to buy a technology stack
| company. Why? It strategically doesn't make any sense, unless
| the bank wanted Clojure/Datomic to prioritize their features
| and requirements.
|
| What would it mean for adoption?
| hellofunk wrote:
| Case you're curious, Nubank has done the same thing for the
| Elixir language!
|
| http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-informati...
| rafaelferreira wrote:
| Not exactly, Elixir continues to be lead by Jose Valim, now at
| Dashbit. (disclosure: nubank employee).
| geokon wrote:
| Does this mean Closure will continue to become more and more
| server/web focused?
|
| I could have the wrong impression, but from all the dead
| libraries I've come across it feels like it used to be all over
| the place with people doing math, visualizations/art, music,
| people trying to run on Android (seemingly the only JVM language
| that has no Android ecosystem/workflow.. crazy) etc.. Now a lot
| of that has atrophied and looks like it's mostly all about web.
| Though there are still interesting nonweb things going on - it
| just feels like a shrinking fraction
|
| Either way, a big congrats to the people involved. Happy for you
| guys. That you for all your hard work, the beautiful language
| that has made me enjoy programming more than ever, and all for
| free :)
| beders wrote:
| It's not untypical for clojure libs to appear "dead". They will
| work just fine. Some libs are just "done"!
| puredanger wrote:
| I disagree that people are not doing those things now or that
| this has changed at all. We have a decade of yearly Clojure
| surveys that show people continue to do all those things (and
| lots more).
|
| Most (70-80%) of Clojure developers work on web apps because
| most programmers work on web apps.
|
| People that like Clojure use it for everything you can think of
| and I expect them to keep doing so.
| Heliosmaster wrote:
| FWIW Clojurescript can also be used in ESP32:
| https://blog.tindie.com/2020/07/clojurescript-on-esp32-why-n...
|
| Mike Fikes and the team at Vouch.io are doing some interesting
| work there, using cljs for IOT.
| johnfn wrote:
| I think what you might be seeing is actually just a decline in
| interest of the language in general:
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
| [deleted]
| dustingetz wrote:
| The bull case here is if Nubank goes full Amazon and uses banking
| as a beachhead to create the next layer up from AWS, which
| Clojure/Datomic is amazingly perfect for - data all the things
| juskrey wrote:
| And we'll have to go back using sqlite again
| nudpiedo wrote:
| there is also an on Prem solution, and I believe that's what
| such customer wants.
| bananaface wrote:
| [deleted]
| bhurlow wrote:
| Is a "transaction log" not exactly the technical shape of a
| bank?
| [deleted]
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| It's definitely the shape of accounting
| jwr wrote:
| My entire business is built on Clojure and ClojureScript, and it
| would not have been possible without these languages. I am always
| slightly worried by this kind of news, because it means that the
| main Clojure team is now dependent on a single institution. But
| it could be good news as well, depending on how things go.
|
| Until now, I've been getting nothing but excellence from the
| Clojure team: not just great tools, but also great thinking
| behind them. I appreciate what I've gotten (for free!) until now,
| and hope that the trend will continue :-)
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Would love to hear what you learn from engaging on any
| expectations you have for roadmap. I wrote separately that I
| see a bright (very bright, complete game changer) future for
| the toolchain in finance, but finance is a special ecosystem
| where general purpose languages with goofy syntax become niche-
| sometimes very large niche, but still niche.
| jwr wrote:
| Niche is fine. I don't know why people are obsessed with
| languages becoming dominant, or enjoy calling languages
| "dead". I don't need everyone to use Clojure. In fact, I'd
| rather prefer that my competitors use something else, because
| it gives me an edge over them.
|
| I don't have "expectations", I think "hopes" is a better word
| here. I hope to continue to profit from the core team's
| thinking and be able to use the tools they create and ideas
| they generate.
| randompwd wrote:
| I mean, that may be true to a point in the long run/true
| outside of webdev.
|
| But the dev who intimately knows Spring & Java/Kotlin is
| gonna be far ahead of you for the first 9 months, given
| that there's so much out of the box functionality. They'll
| be going through a nice paint by numbers scenario for most
| of the heavy lifting whilst you have to expound effort in
| creating what's done.
| fulafel wrote:
| Usually you hear skepticism the other way around (that
| Clojure's productivity advantage over Java style
| languages in a project could diminish over time as static
| typing advantages can be more pronounced in the twilight
| years of the apps lifespan).
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Understand the argument- it's language vs ecosystem- but
| Clojure leverages the JVM ecosystem in a first class
| manner. Spring is very productive, to be sure, but I
| still find that in terms of LOC, Clojure requires less
| for simple cases, and much less for hard cases, and
| Clojure practices- like REPL-driven development-
| themselves are more productive/faster iteration.
| lukashrb wrote:
| Interesting view. What are the 'out of the box
| functionalities' which Clojure is lacking? Keep in mind
| Clojure provides Java interop and with clojurescript js
| interop. The clojure ecosystem has also pretty great
| libraries to work with. For example take a look at fulcro
| or re-frame, also metosin works on some really great
| libraries and there is much more.
| dkersten wrote:
| > What are the 'out of the box functionalities' which
| Clojure is lacking?
|
| None, because for anything Clojure doesn't have, you just
| lean on the JVM (or JS for Clojurescript). Sure, the
| syntax isn't as pretty and there are some abstraction
| mismatches, but in my experience, you create thin
| wrappers to hide this and move on.
| slifin wrote:
| If what you're comfortable with is Spring or Drupal or
| Rails and those work for your use case then more power to
| you
|
| At the same time it's true there are products like roam
| research that are fundamentally harder to achieve in a
| cookie cutter environment
|
| This talk kind of eludes to why that is
| https://youtu.be/rI8tNMsozo0 but it's worth learning
| there's many mature pieces of tech in this community that
| are astounding
|
| If you need boring.lib then reach into Java/JavaScript
| with the easiest interop I've ever used
| phrygian wrote:
| I suppose a question for you would be how has your business
| supported clojure(script)? It seems to me to be a case of a
| business that has benefited from clojure - and wants to be
| invested in its future - doing something about it. It cost
| something to provide what you built your business on :)
| jwr wrote:
| A while ago I started to set aside an R&D budget that goes
| towards developers writing open source, specifically Clojure
| and ClojureScript libraries, and tools like magit or CIDER.
| The amounts are still small (this is not an enterprise
| business), but I'm increasing them regularly.
|
| I want to see a stable, long-term ecosystem with maintainers
| that are getting paid for their work.
| dkersten wrote:
| I am about to (next two or three months) launch a
| company/product that is heavily built on Clojure(script)
| too and I was actually thinking about this exact thing just
| this week! There are a number of libraries that I rely on
| that I would love to give back to, both as a thanks for the
| work so far, and to fund future development. I'm not in a
| position to do so yet, but its something I very strongly
| hope to do in the not-too-distant future, if things go
| generally well.
| swyx wrote:
| what was your decision process leading to bet on Clojure?
| jwr wrote:
| I used to enjoy programming in Common Lisp, then saw a talk
| by Rich Hickey which intrigued me. I gave Clojure a try (this
| was about 8 years ago I think) and (much to my surprise) it
| turned out it works really well. It also turned out that a
| coherent concurrency story is important, and that programming
| with mutable data is not a very good idea after all, so I
| abandoned CL completely.
|
| Over the years, I got many fantastic gifts: ClojureScript,
| transducers, core.async, spec -- and more. I'm very happy
| with the choice. I also think my business would not have been
| possible without Clojure and ClojureScript: the leverage I
| have because of them lets me run a single-founder self-funded
| business.
| nathell wrote:
| That'd have been 11 years ago. I know because my earliest
| Clojure project on GitHub hearkens back to July 2009, and I
| jumped onto the bandwagon after hearing enthusiastic
| opinions of yours.
|
| Not sure whether I ever had the opportunity to properly
| thank you, but let me say so now. Thank you, jwr.
| jacobsmith1984 wrote:
| "My entire business is built on Clojure and ClojureScript, and
| it would not have been possible without these languages."
|
| No company depends any new language to succeed, depends on
| customers.
| finnjohnsen2 wrote:
| I would rephrase and ask why he claim his business would not
| exists without Clojure/ClojureScript :)
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Yeah, seems like a cultish thing to say.
| dbancajas wrote:
| can one make a career out of clojure?
| loevborg wrote:
| The company I work for has 7+ open remote roles, all
| Clojure/Script engineers. Clojure is mind-expanding but doesn't
| necessarily take long to become proficient in - we've hired
| many developers with no prior experience who've learned Clojure
| in no time. If you're curious, my email address is in my
| profile
| iammiles wrote:
| I work full-time in the healthcare industry writing mostly
| Clojure(script). I wouldn't base my entire career off it (or
| any one language for that matter), but there are career
| opportunities out there using Clojure.
| tom_b wrote:
| I think this a much more nuanced question than a yes-or-no
| answer can cover.
|
| Looking at LinkedIn or indeed.com with just a simple search for
| Clojure with no geographic qualifier (in the US), we see a very
| small number of listed openings - 252 over the last month at
| LinkedIn or 44 in the last 14 days at indeed. A plain google
| job search on Clojure jobs in the US returns an even smaller
| number.
|
| Some of those job listings will almost certainly have Clojure
| listed as part of a "laundry list" of technologies and the
| actual job will probably not be Clojure oriented.
|
| So just from a raw numbers perspective, the job sites to
| suggest that there aren't a huge number of opportunities.
| Comparatively speaking, there are like 60,000 Java job postings
| on LinkedIn in the last month.
|
| However, if you attend a Clojure/conj (one of the "primary"
| Clojure programming conferences), you will find that many
| attendees are part of some (not super-large?) number of
| companies that use Clojure.
|
| My best advice on building a Clojure career (that I failed to
| follow) is that a programmer who wants to make a Clojure career
| path is to be prepared to spend a significant amount of time
| trying to make connections inside the Clojure community. On top
| of that, you probably need to build a portfolio of project
| experience that you at minimum blog about and preferably speak
| at Clojure conferences, user groups, or meetups.
|
| <edit: removed off-topic thought>
|
| I would gently observe that long-time Clojure developers are
| maybe too close to the tree to see the forest when it comes to
| judging Clojure career opportunities.
|
| But I would love to be wrong about my impression of Clojure job
| opportunities! Perhaps fellow-HN readers could post
| (anonymous?) numbers of Clojure job openings for their company
| to give us a better idea?
| vemv wrote:
| Yes, but you may have to run the extra mile if you want every
| job you get to be a Clojure one
|
| (luckily, extra mile != extra 100 miles)
| puredanger wrote:
| Yes. There are 100s of companies using Clojure.
| https://clojure.org/community/companies
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Why don't they take on the name Cognitect? It is a much better
| brand than Nubank and that would distinguish this from the many
| stories where a no brand or bad brand big co buys a good brand.
| positr0n wrote:
| Nubank has over ten million customers and undoubtedly many more
| people in their target market that know their brand. The only
| people that would recognize Cognitect are clojure developers or
| particularly hardcore fans.
| yomly wrote:
| Is it a better brand? I believe Nubank offers b2c services.
| What are all those customers going to think when
| Nubank->Cognitect...
| G4BB3R wrote:
| 23 million customers disagree
| stopachka wrote:
| Congratulations team! I remember watching the Nubank infoq talk,
| and sensing that they have a serious hacker culture.
|
| This could be great for the clojure community. One idea, if done,
| could step function the community: open source datomic... Oh ma
| gad if that happens!
| andrenth wrote:
| Are there any technical posts from Nubank on how they manage such
| a large Clojure codebase (I guess it must be Clojure's largest
| user in the industry).
|
| I'm looking for things like how to refactor safely in the absence
| of static typing, for example. Do they make use of spec?
|
| I'm a big fan of static typing, but when using a dynamic language
| with immutable values and pattern matching, like Erlang, I don't
| miss it that much. Maybe with Clojure is the same?
| ballpark wrote:
| I've watched a number of Clojure centric talks from Nubank
| employees. Actually, I think it was one particular employee,
| but I don't remember his name. One was on how they do testing.
| The others were about Fulcro, which is a very interesting web
| frontend library/framework.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Not sure we have any talks about that specifically, but what I
| can say is that on the Clojure codebases:
|
| - We rely heavily on testing (unit tests, property-
| based/generative and integration)
|
| - We adopt a micro-services architecture, so most codebases are
| small enough that refactoring is easy, or sometimes we just
| replace the service altogether
|
| - We leverage Schema (https://github.com/plumatic/schema)
| and/or clojure.spec (https://clojure.org/guides/spec) to
| annotate functions and data schemas, but it's opt-in
|
| - We have static checking of data schemas across boundaries
| (e.g. checking data producers did not break consumers over HTTP
| or Kafka), which is where we found the most value (replaced
| complicated end-to-end tests)
| stopachka wrote:
| Curious, did you really find that microservices helped?
|
| The downsides can be so tremendous -- I wonder if nubank
| would have done better to services in the low digit range.
|
| (context: my thoughts on it -> https://stopa.io/post/236)
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I believe micro-services change the trade-offs, and it's a
| matter of what you value more.
|
| We certainly have to invest more on infra-structure,
| monitoring, standardisation, and we have been doing since
| day one - by now it's pretty robust, to the point our
| internal tooling allowed us to migrate from raw EC2 to
| kubernetes (https://www.cncf.io/case-study/nubank/) and it
| was a transparent change to all services and teams.
|
| On the other hand, failures are more localised and we gain
| robustness and speed to do certain kind of changes.
|
| Your point about getting domain boundaries wrong is true,
| but IMO it's a pain orthogonal to micro-services. The
| solution is the same as if you defined a sub-optimal class
| interface on a big mono-repo: relentless refactoring. We
| are often strangling (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/Strang
| lerFigApplication.html) and replacing legacy services.
| andrenth wrote:
| Thanks! Can you talk a bit more about the static checking of
| cross-boundaries schemas? Any relation to tools that allow a
| schema to evolve without breaking compatibility, like
| protobuf?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| It's not based on protobuf. There's some in-house tooling
| that checks the schemas of producers against consumers
| against known versions (aka the versions in production),
| and we run it as part of the CI.
|
| Since services implement standard components/protocols
| there are standardised hooks to extract these schemas
| definitions from each HTTP endpoint or Kafka consumer.
| nt591 wrote:
| Nubank also acquired Plataformatec and the Elixir team. Very
| interested to watch how this plays out.
| Plugawy wrote:
| Not quite: they acquired the __consulting __part of
| Plataformatec, the core Elixir folks are running a new
| venture:https://changelog.com/podcast/402
| fulafel wrote:
| Apparently Nubank has offices in Berlin, wonder if at some point
| there could be jobs there for working on open source Clojure
| things.
| jacobsmith1984 wrote:
| Now there is a conflict of interest in Cognitect cloud services.
| Would you trust a bank watch over your strategic information?
| dgb23 wrote:
| Nubank has a very inspiring story, both for engineers that are
| fans of Clojure & Datomic and for entrepreneurs that want to do
| "crazy" things like entering the bank sector.
|
| This must be very validating and exciting for both Cognitect and
| Nubank.
|
| I'm excited of the future impact on Clojure and Datomic. I get
| the impression that _all_[0] involved parties deeply care about
| what made them great so far.
|
| [0] I'm getting that vibe based on some talks I saw of Lucas
| Cavalcanti and Edward Wible, available on Youtube.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Yeah, I saw the Nubank folks present in person in NYC just
| prior to COVID. I am a Clojure fan, to be sure, and also a
| banking/money dweeb. Soup to nuts it was one of the most
| impressive presentations / achievements I have seen. They were
| clearly operating in the future. Congrats to both and looking
| forward to growing the community.
|
| Plans to release a SAAS banking core in the US? Pretty please?
| ru552 wrote:
| Was this a conference? Possible link to the talk mentioned?
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Clojure NYC meetup, sounds like video may be damaged but
| was salvaged:
|
| https://www.meetup.com/Clojure-nyc/events/268460200/
| setr wrote:
| direct link to the video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dW4V3stFX0
| puredanger wrote:
| Exactly right.
| auganov wrote:
| > Nubank has grown to 600 Clojure developers, running 2.5 million
| lines of Clojure code in 500 microservices
|
| Wow, that's enormous especially for a concise language like
| Clojure. Very happy about this announcement as a Clojure user.
| Sounds like it's going to be viable for at least another decade.
| bhurlow wrote:
| I'm just remembering the sad collapse of RethinkDB...
|
| The task of making a viable commercial database in 2020 is
| herculean and I can really empathize with the team's need to both
| keep cashflow and have a sufficiently sized deployment to debug
| against.
|
| Can also say that everyone I've met at nubank are really
| passionate about the ecosystem and seem like they'll be excellent
| partners
| fulafel wrote:
| Datomic is 8+ years old and by all accounts has a healthy
| customer base, it's not like they are in the takeoff stage. But
| of course they have to keep up like everyone else, especially
| now that there is competition from the OSS side (Crux).
| robertfw wrote:
| I remember being very excited by RethinkDB, it was a huge shame
| to see that go down. I feel like they signed their own death
| warrant by making a product that was super easy to use and was
| well documented.. so no support contracts, because simply not
| needed. Such a shame.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > From their start in 2013, Nubank has grown to 600 Clojure
| developers, running 2.5 million lines of Clojure code in 500
| microservices on over 2000 Datomic servers.
|
| Yikes that sounds like hell. Let's stop bragging about costs as a
| succeess store? Headcount? LoC? microservices? These are all to
| be _minimized_.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I really hope the hn trend of being reactionarily resistant
| against everything that isn't a postgresql monolith would stop.
| nlitened wrote:
| What if a typical bank usually has 20 times more LoC and 5x
| more developers?
| puredanger wrote:
| Edward Wible, CTO at Nubank, actually makes this comparison to
| other banks (and how small it is) at
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYYwxgaxB0 (in the first few
| minutes).
| clj_throwaway wrote:
| Throwaway account, for obvious reasons.
|
| This is great for nubank, but how is this supposed to work for
| other users of Clojure and Datomic? Who is really going to be
| interested in building on top of tech owned by a (new, unknown,
| regional) bank?
|
| Someone said that this is just like Amazon (who would build on
| top of tech from a bookstore??), but I hope it's obvious the two
| situations are very different.
|
| I expect that I'll have to be looking for a new job in a year's
| time :-(
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Is it better to be owned by an adtech company (React, Angular,
| Go)?
| clj_throwaway wrote:
| If you asked me that 15 years ago, I'd say "no". In
| hindsight, it sort of makes sense given their objective of
| increasing time spent online and the quality of the
| experience.
|
| The proposition here is that nubank will be the first bank to
| successfully turn into a software vendor. Maybe my worries
| will be nothing in 10 years, but no one can say its an
| obvious outcome.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Bloomberg and Jane street (not banks but still finance).
| They don't own OCaml but are heavily involved in its
| development.
| lvh wrote:
| Nubank already ships software, Cognitect is already a
| healthy consultancy, no particular reason to kill either
| one. Surely we can agree that banks also care about good
| UX? Nubank in particular is known for it.
|
| (I appreciate that you may not have heard of Nubank but I
| don't think calling them "unknown" is fair. They have
| attracted a literal billion in funding in a little over a
| year. They have over 10 million users.)
| [deleted]
| puredanger wrote:
| Per https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-nubank/,
| "Nubank does not own Clojure, just as Cognitect never owned
| Clojure. Nubank will take over Cognitect's role as a corporate
| sponsor for Clojure, funding the core development effort".
| clj_throwaway wrote:
| Outside of the license, OF COURSE Relevance, then Cognitect,
| now nubank owns clojure, in every other way that matters.
|
| Now do datomic :-)
| dragandj wrote:
| I am pretty sure that whoever owns Cognitect is in no
| position to boss Rich around regarding Clojure. Besides,
| Clojure is rather simple and stable. No need to change it
| dramatically...
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Nubank is a company valued at over $10 billion, with investing
| from major Silicon Valley firms. It is not unknown to millions
| of people, and is expanding internationally so I don't think
| they'll be regional much longer. Clojure and datomic being such
| a good fit for their tech stack of hundreds of microservices
| and thousands of databases should really encourage people to
| use clojure like Erlang's history in telecommunications
| encouraged people to adopt Elixir.
| xmlblog wrote:
| > Who is really going to be interested in building on top of
| tech owned by a (new, unknown, regional) bank?
|
| As opposed to building on top of tech "owned" by a small
| software consultancy? Perhaps I simply lack imagination, but
| how is this worse?
| clj_throwaway wrote:
| We all know the history of acquihires. Key tech and products
| inevitably are swallowed, never seen outside again.
|
| Besides that, datomic really is a great solution for banks
| and fintech....are other firms like that going to buy from
| another bank, maybe a competitor?
| mr_custard wrote:
| A lot of people don't seem to mind building on top of tech
| owned and developed by a telecommunications company - Erlang.
| clj_throwaway wrote:
| Yep, telecomms and banks, very similar dynamics and
| incentives /s
| [deleted]
| kgwgk wrote:
| In what relevant way are they different? (I find that your
| comment has more sense without the /s tag)
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Yes? What incentive exactly are you implying banks have
| that make them less suitable than other mega-corporations
| for the purposes of developing a programming language?
| clj_throwaway wrote:
| Banks and fintech often view their in-house tech as
| competitive advantages, and they usually don't care a
| whit about building cred in dev communities (a common
| reason why projects are OSS in the first place, to drive
| recruitment or promote a complimentary platform).
|
| A good outcome isn't impossible, but it might be
| unprecedented
| kgwgk wrote:
| And telecommunications companies don't see their
| technology as a competitive advantage?
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Nubank has presented their tech several times at a number
| of conferences and I believe they often sponsor those
| conferences. It's not a traditional bank, like Airbnb is
| not a traditional travel agency, and Amazon is not a
| traditional bookstore. This is not your local
| neighborhood credit union or ancient behemoth running
| COBOL mainframes.
| lvh wrote:
| Rich Hickey literally bet his retirement savings on
| making Clojure, and owns all the IP. It seems unlikely
| he's just going to let them smother it.
| kgraves wrote:
| what does this mean for the future of clojure?
|
| I am a bit worried that a startup has acquired two companies that
| have extremely deep experience in specialised languages
| Platformatec (Elixir) and now Clojure (Cognitect)
| draven wrote:
| The answer is in the blog post ("Nubank understands the unique
| value of Clojure and Datomic, and is committed to continuing
| both without disruption." and the bullet points that follow.)
| thom wrote:
| That's what they _say_, it's not necessarily the answer to
| the question.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Well then what would you prefer the answer to be instead?
| thom wrote:
| "Nobody knows"
| halostatue wrote:
| The acquisition of Plataformatec will have almost no impact on
| Elixir, as Jose Valim had already moved to/created a new firm,
| Dashbit.
| dkersten wrote:
| It sounds like not much will change.
|
| I do wonder about datomic, though, as people I've spoken to at
| Clojure conferences seem to have made use of Cognitect's
| consulting as a kind of more advanced support mechanism and
| they say that they will stop the consulting work.
| stuarthalloway wrote:
| All Datomic consulting will continue.
| nojito wrote:
| It says this in your post.
|
| Cognitect will continue to offer professional services for
| Datomic customers, _but will transition out of general
| consulting development._
|
| Does this mean your general consulting services are going
| away?
| [deleted]
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I friend of mine hired the principles at Cognitect to
| kick off a Clojure/Datomic project. They were like a
| force of nature, really, and very quickly got things set
| up and helped with architectural decisions, etc. I would
| imagine that they have helped hundreds of customers this
| way.
|
| From the blog post, I think that the answer to your
| question is yes: they will stop general consulting
| services.
| randompwd wrote:
| Here's hoping they release a getting started project now
| that they've dipped out of general consulting.There must
| have been a standard-ish template in use.
| dkersten wrote:
| Great, so it sounds like not much will change for external
| users of Clojure and Datomic. Sounds like the the biggest
| change is in terms of funding.
|
| Sounds good to me, congratulations!
|
| EDIT: I guess my confusion was between _professional
| services for Datomic_ and _general consulting_ , since both
| were mentioned in the context of Datomic.
| michel_dib wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am a Nubank employee, so there might be bias.
|
| Regarding the future of Clojure, I believe that not much will
| change actually. Before Clojure was sponsored by Cognitect and
| had Rich's / Stu's and Alex's stewardship and that's gonna
| continue to be the case just swapping the sponsoring company
| behind it. IMHO it's only on Nubank's best interest to have a
| strong community around Clojure and Datomic as well.
|
| About Platformatec I think that was a very different thing, it
| was more an acqui-hiring, and before Elxir's stewardship was
| under the company (but having very different development
| dynamics compared to Clojure) and after the agreement, it was
| transferred to the community. So the company was pretty much
| dissolved after the contract, and back then, that was clear and
| transparent, as it was announced to happen.
| [deleted]
| kamaal wrote:
| I think the history of large companies hiring
| maintainers/authors of programming languages/libraries they use
| has so far gone good.
|
| Take for example php, perl(booking.com, bbc, craigslist), js(fb
| etc).
|
| The language needs to be supported financially though.
| Companies are not living beings, typically its some SVP making
| decisions. Sometimes they do support, but sometimes big shots
| do feel programmers are spending too much time working for
| greater good, while they should be working for company profits.
|
| So it depends on the bosses you report to. There is no easy
| answer to this question, because many times it just comes to
| down to one person making decisions.
| regularfry wrote:
| What would somewhat worry me somewhat is what the situation
| would be if Nubank went pop, and Cognitect were no longer in a
| position to step back in as sponsors.
| fulafel wrote:
| Would Nubank be still considered a startup?
| ramon wrote:
| Nubank is one of the biggest startups in Brazil and I am a Nubank
| customer and I must say they have the best service available.
| Treating customers as customers.
| afefers wrote:
| The customer support is the best! No waiting, no pre-recorded
| messages, no muzak, no menu. A real person picks the phone and
| talks to you. Oh and the app is a delight!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-07-23 23:00 UTC)