Nubank acquires Cognitect

https://cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nubank

by zrkrlc • 6 years ago

618 271 6 years ago

kgraves• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.)

thom2• 6 years ago

That's what they _say_, it's not necessarily the answer to the question.

dkersten7• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

All Datomic consulting will continue.

fulafel5• 6 years ago

Would Nubank be still considered a startup?

michel_dib• 6 years ago

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.

kamaal3• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

halostatue• 6 years ago

The acquisition of Plataformatec will have almost no impact on Elixir, as Jose Valim had already moved to/created a new firm, Dashbit.

rafaelferreira2• 6 years ago

Nubank’s co-founder and CTO offers his perspective: https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-nubank/

hu3• 6 years ago

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.

kbuchanan• 6 years ago

He makes mention of 2,300 Datomic databases. Can anyone shed some light on how a company maintains (or requires?)... 2,300 databases? What business needs lead to something like this? What kind of reporting pipeline possibly could pull so many dbs with cross concerns together under one roof?

pizza_worker• 6 years ago

Brazilian tax law, Brazilian financial regulation, Brazilian fraud prevention...

Things get byzantine fast in Brazil.

zachrose• 6 years ago

Let’s say the company has four databases and 500 technical employees. That could get you to 2k personal development instances. Take your non-development instances and multiple for failover, blue-green deployments, multiple data centers. It doesn’t necessarily sound nice but it’s conceivable.

fulafel5• 6 years ago

In datomic the concept of a database is pretty light, creating a db doesn't imply spinning up a new backend stack.

praveenperera• 6 years ago

First plataformatec (company behind elixir) now this. Interesting.

samtechie2• 6 years ago

It was more of an aquahire and Jose Valim the creator of Elixir left Plataformatec to start his own consultancy. All assets related to Elixir were transferred to the community. The rest of the core contributors are not affiliated to Plataformatec therefore the acquisition had no effect on Elixir.

josefrichter2• 6 years ago

Killer team.

rel2thr• 6 years ago

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

kamaal3• 6 years ago

Also lets hope they acquire cursive ide too and offer it for free.

Clojure deserves an IDE for larger adoption.

puredanger9• 6 years ago

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.

kgwxd• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

What is meant by "joining"? Did Nubank aquire Cognitec?

josefrichter2• 6 years ago

yes

dustingetz5• 6 years ago

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

bananaface• 6 years ago

[deleted]

bhurlow3• 6 years ago

Is a "transaction log" not exactly the technical shape of a bank?

juskrey8• 6 years ago

And we'll have to go back using sqlite again

nudpiedo• 6 years ago

there is also an on Prem solution, and I believe that's what such customer wants.

adamtait• 6 years ago

Ha! I was going to reply to this comment - "If you're interested in data-all-the-things, then you should take a look at Hyperfiddle" - until I recognized the user handle and realized that you already knew about Hyperfiddle. (for those reading along, dustingetz built Hyperfiddle)

dustingetz5• 6 years ago

still building! we killed the saas thing for now and are releasing a web framework soon - declarative crud apps from nothing but function defs, specs, and datomic! All IO is managed and composes like Datomic Peer fns compose. Userland has no async, error handling etc. Complex pickers with typeahead search, query params etc are declared in one LOC

fulafel5• 6 years ago

Apparently Nubank has offices in Berlin, wonder if at some point there could be jobs there for working on open source Clojure things.

scribu• 6 years ago

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?

gphil• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

I would assume it's because it's easier to provide a mathemathical proof for the code with functionnal programming.

Joe8Bit• 6 years ago

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.

bhurlow3• 6 years ago

any relevant links to share about this?

dgb232• 6 years ago

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.

orolle2• 6 years ago

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.

hk__2• 6 years ago

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?

socksy2• 6 years ago

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.

alexbanks5• 6 years ago

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".

moon2• 6 years ago

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/...

dig1• 6 years ago

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.

darthrupert2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

As a counter example, Stripe uses Ruby and Mongo.

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

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.

dan-robertson• 6 years ago

I think the best argument is that there are a lot of small financial institutions (small referring mainly to the tech groups at them, that is, so you might hear that some big bank uses eg Haskell but really it’s just some group within their IB arm. I’m sure google has some Haskell around too), and often the kind of people they employ tend to like weird languages.

Plenty of financial institutions use lots of c++ or java and plenty use cobol too.

dgb232• 6 years ago

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.

puredanger9• 6 years ago

Exactly right.

jonahbenton8• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

Was this a conference? Possible link to the talk mentioned?

hestefisk2• 6 years ago

Literally ‘functional banking’ :)

clj_throwaway6• 6 years ago

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 :-(

mr_custard• 6 years ago

A lot of people don't seem to mind building on top of tech owned and developed by a telecommunications company - Erlang.

clj_throwaway6• 6 years ago

Yep, telecomms and banks, very similar dynamics and incentives /s

myth_drannon2• 6 years ago

Is it better to be owned by an adtech company (React, Angular, Go)?

clj_throwaway6• 6 years ago

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.

puredanger9• 6 years ago

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_throwaway6• 6 years ago

Outside of the license, OF COURSE Relevance, then Cognitect, now nubank owns clojure, in every other way that matters.

Now do datomic :-)

xmlblog• 6 years ago

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_throwaway6• 6 years ago

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?

ilikehurdles5• 6 years ago

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.

systems• 6 years ago

Since Nubank, is not in the business of selling software does this mean, they might open source datomic ?

jacknews• 6 years ago

Will the license change?

puredanger9• 6 years ago

No change in Clojure's license (it is still EPL 1.0).

adelarsq• 6 years ago

No. It's just a "cooperation" to use technologies.

tomconnors• 6 years ago

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_b3• 6 years ago

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.

escherize• 6 years ago

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.

havenconnect• 6 years ago

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

nickpeterson• 6 years ago

You may want to look into Anchor Modeling http://www.anchormodeling.com/

mark_l_watson4• 6 years ago

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

andrenth5• 6 years ago

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?

hcarvalhoalves5• 6 years ago

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)

andrenth5• 6 years ago

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?

stopachka2• 6 years ago

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)

hestefisk2• 6 years ago

Questions: transactions are really important in banking systems. If you have 100s of Microservices how do you manage transactions across them? Or maybe all of your microservices run on top of a monolith database with transaction safety?

ballpark• 6 years ago

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.

timgilbert• 6 years ago

Nubank did a presentation on their approach to testing at the Clojure/NYC meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dW4V3stFX0

nt591• 6 years ago

Nubank also acquired Plataformatec and the Elixir team. Very interested to watch how this plays out.

Plugawy• 6 years ago

Not quite: they acquired the consulting part of Plataformatec, the core Elixir folks are running a new venture: https://changelog.com/podcast/402

sidcool2• 6 years ago

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.

hvis• 6 years ago

This is the company that employs Rich Hickey and most of (all?) other maintainers of Clojure, the programming language.

sidcool2• 6 years ago

Ah. Makes sense. Thanks

hellofunk• 6 years ago

Case you’re curious, Nubank has done the same thing for the Elixir language!

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-informati...

rafaelferreira2• 6 years ago

Not exactly, Elixir continues to be lead by José Valim, now at Dashbit. (disclosure: nubank employee).

auganov• 6 years ago

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.

bhurlow3• 6 years ago

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

fulafel5• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

ramon• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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!

sizeofchar• 6 years ago

Customer here, as well. IMHO, the best company currently in Brazil.

sandGorgon• 6 years ago

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 ?

JBiserkov• 6 years ago

I believe the intersection of use cases for QLDB and Datomic is the empty set.

tom_b3• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

(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)

gdsdfe3• 6 years ago

Oh wow! I didn't know that

swyx2• 6 years ago

gotta ask - what did he do after 2009? is he alright now?

microcolonel• 6 years ago

Rich Hickey is an artist and a hero, I owe him so much.

juskrey8• 6 years ago

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)

whoisjuan4• 6 years ago

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.

juskrey8• 6 years ago

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.

raphaeljlps• 6 years ago

Just to clarify, Nubank is not an actual/formal bank in Brazil. They have operating licenses as Financial institution and Payment institution though.

moocowtruck3• 6 years ago

In the US for example, banks not only contribute to federal insurance but also have built joint private reserves to weather economic turmoil.

did you miss how the banks all had to be bailed out a few years back?

jonahbenton8• 6 years ago

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.

juskrey8• 6 years ago

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.

kinleyd• 6 years ago

An excellent assessment - Rich, Stu and team clearly must have assessed the option similarly. Congratulations to Cognitect and here's wishing them well.

mapgrep• 6 years ago

“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.

latortuga• 6 years ago

Cognitect is not winding down Datomic, Datomic Cloud, or Datomic consulting, and they have big name customers including Facebook and Netflix.

dustingetz5• 6 years ago

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

juskrey8• 6 years ago

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.

dbancajas• 6 years ago

can one make a career out of clojure?

puredanger9• 6 years ago

Yes. There are 100s of companies using Clojure. https://clojure.org/community/companies

iammiles• 6 years ago

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_b3• 6 years ago

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?

beders5• 6 years ago

I replied to a posting on Clojurians #remote-work slack channel and had my first Clojure/ClojureScript job within a week. That was just awesome!

vemv2• 6 years ago

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)

loevborg• 6 years ago

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

GlennS• 6 years ago

Yes, in specific fields like finance.

But, usually better to weight technology quite low when picking what to work on. Product and company culture has much bigger impacts on your quality of life in my opinion.

I don't want to work with Spring, TYPO3, or OOUI, and all of those things have made me sad in the past. But, I really don't want to work at a company where people micro-manage, run around like headless chickens, get stressed at each-other, schedule endless meetings, or where the product is something pointless that no-one wants. Any of that stuff is bad.

travisjungroth• 6 years ago

People do it. And I’m trying to hire two Clojure devs.

eigenhombre2• 6 years ago

Full-time in Clojure since early 2014; the jobs found me even before I had professional Clojure experience. There is definitely work out there... we have been hiring nearly continuously in Chicago for the past few years: junior, midlevel and senior alike. This took a pause for COVID-19 but I expect that to end soon.

Your mileage may vary, and I don't think the language is for everyone, but it is very satisfying to work with and it's putting groceries on the table for lots of people. (I'm happy to discuss more; contact info is in my profile.)

samtechie2• 6 years ago

I haven't used Clojure before but I have worked mostly with Elixir another niche functional language. In my experience because of the limited talent pool, most companies tend to prefer experienced candidates and if they are to take you on as a junior, you probably have to be significantly experienced in another mainstream language. It's very hard for someone to take a punt on a junior Elixir or Clojure developer who has little or no experience in any other language. Generally, niche languages are not a great bet if you are just starting out. You can of-course build the experience by working on side projects, blogging or speaking at conferences. In short its a labour of love. If you learn Clojure or in my case Elixir for the explicit reason of getting a job you might become very frustrated and disappointed. This is my experience.

PaulHoule• 6 years ago

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.

yomly• 6 years ago

Is it a better brand? I believe Nubank offers b2c services. What are all those customers going to think when Nubank->Cognitect...

positr0n• 6 years ago

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.

G4BB3R• 6 years ago

23 million customers disagree

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

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.

nlitened• 6 years ago

What if a typical bank usually has 20 times more LoC and 5x more developers?

ilikehurdles5• 6 years ago

I really hope the hn trend of being reactionarily resistant against everything that isn't a postgresql monolith would stop.

puredanger9• 6 years ago

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).

ksec• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

They are a big Clojure shop. They hire Plataformatec as a consulting company. This podcast has more info: https://changelog.com/podcast/402

riadvargas2• 6 years ago

We (Nubank) actually acqui-hired Plataformatec earlier this year: https://www.contxto.com/en/startups/fintech-nubank-acqui-hir...

jwr8• 6 years ago

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 :-)

jonahbenton8• 6 years ago

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.

jwr8• 6 years ago

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.

phrygian• 6 years ago

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 :)

jwr8• 6 years ago

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.

swyx2• 6 years ago

what was your decision process leading to bet on Clojure?

jwr8• 6 years ago

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.

jacobsmith19842• 6 years ago

"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• 6 years ago

I would rephrase and ask why he claim his business would not exists without Clojure/ClojureScript :)

Tostino• 6 years ago

I feel like this is just being pedantic. obviously business is nothing without its customers, however it's also nothing without something to sell.

riku_iki• 6 years ago

it would not have been possible without these languages

What critical features Clojure has, which don't exist in other platforms/languages?

dustingetz5• 6 years ago

Lisp + immutability is the right foundation for symbolic/logic programming, datalog, declarative programming, graph programming. None of this is really feasible in other langs due to bad ergonomics and no coordinated ecosystem buyin. Haskell lacks platform portability and Scala 2 is just too complicated to think clearly about anything high level.

eigenhombre2• 6 years ago

Most things in Clojure can be found in other languages. However, Clojure has an especially stable and coherent design story, and is quite a bit better thought out than the other languages I've programmed in professionally. The pieces just work together really well, and there isn't a lot of "extra stuff" that only a die-hard specialist would know, or need to. (I currently work at a financial institution, not Nubank, that uses Clojure heavily.)

A few other high points:

- macro-based metaprogramming, familiar to any Lisp-er; macros are essentially functions which write code for you, which allow one to create extremely concise constructs to reduce repetition in code;

- functional programming: probably the hardest thing to get one's head around if coming from a more mainstream language, FP reduces mutable state to a minimum, eliminating one of the biggest source of programming defects and making programs significantly easier to reason about. Additional concurrency-safe state primitives in Clojure makes concurrency a trivial addition to many programs;

- hosted on the JVM, giving interoperability with Java libraries and significant ease of deployment compared to other dynamic languages (I recently went back to Python to roll out a small web service and was amazed at how much more painful the deployment/devops story was compared to our Clojure services).

These are some of the benefits we leverage; other people here more qualified than me have enumerated others. (Plus Datomic, whose philosophy aligns fully with Clojure, though I have yet to use it in production.)

On a personal note, one final attribute I appreciate is structural editing: as a Lisp, Clojure code is data, a feature which one's editor can make use of to allow operations that would be alien to non-Lispers, such as: absorbing nearby expressions or expelling them; splitting them; sorting and reordering; and writing your own automated refactorings without having to write parsers for the language in question. Treating code as data structures rather than strings of characters allows for speed in writing and refactoring code that is hard to give up once you get used to it.

Nihilartikel2• 6 years ago

From my standpoint as a one man show, it's invaluable to be able to write the web client and backend in the same language, to share code between them... and have that one language NOT be JS. Clojurescript with Rum/Citrus or Reagent/Reframe deliver on the promise of React/Redux with much less fuss and overhead.

Editing JSX is a pain in comparison to the Hiccup syntax used more often in CLJS, e.g. [:div {:class shiny} "some stuff" [:button "OK"]] - with the structural editing in any good Clojure editor you can cut, paste, entire blocks of tags, or slurp a tag from outside your div into it, or spit one out, all with a few keystrokes, never stopping to find some closing </div> tag.. I guess some JSX IDEs might do this, but it's really nice that the HTML is represented as just another piece of data, not some weird chimerical syntax bolt on.

With Figwheel or ShadowCLJS hot reloading is instantaneous and doesn't even interrupt your webapp. If they're written properly, functions and the app state are not conflated at all, so you can modify any function in your app's rendering or behavior and as long as they aren't incompatible with the runtime state, it will just pop right into your browser. Illustrated well in this video where the author is interactively re-implementing Flappy Bird: https://youtu.be/KZjFVdU8VLI?t=277

I feel particularly strongly about this having started out doing front end work primarily in cljs but recently being falling into using React/Redux for a contract and being REALLY strung out by the tedium of working with them.

mping3• 6 years ago

My opinion is that clojure has a confluence of just right abstractions and language choices that allows you to be very very succint while still very readable which in turn makes the language very expressive. I can name a few features: immutability, multimethods, protocols, transducers, lazy sequences, macros, and a very small and sturdy core. All of these features exist in some other language, but the combination of them together is what makes clojure great IMHO.

Besides, experienced clojure devs just see things differently and end up writing lots of nice libs that capture the essence of the feature the lib is providing. Think datomic (immutable database), reagent (interface to react), honeysql (data-as-sql), "dependency injection" (mount/component & others), pull/query-based UIs (om.next and its spiritual successor, fulcro) and so on.

jwr8• 6 years ago

In video compression, the advantage of a new standard over an old one is never a single "critical feature". It's a combination of small gains, single percentage points that accumulate to make a huge difference. If you look at H.264 vs MPEG-2, there is no single defining "critical feature", and yet you can get roughly twice as much video into the same bandwidth.

It's similar with Clojure. Are transducers "critical" or revolutionary? Not at all. And yet they facilitate building composable and reusable pipelines, which helps me with modeling a complex problem domain. Is core.async "critical"? Hardly. And yet it allows me to build reliable asynchronous data flows.

Clojure is a practical language, designed by someone with decades of experience in building complex systems.

geokon• 6 years ago

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 :)

Heliosmaster• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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=%...

beders5• 6 years ago

It's not untypical for clojure libs to appear "dead". They will work just fine. Some libs are just "done"!

puredanger9• 6 years ago

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.

tincholio• 6 years ago

Web is of course kinda dominant everywhere, but there's great stuff happening in other domains. For example, have a look at what the Scicloj folks are doing for data science https://github.com/scicloj/ as well as the Tech Ascent libraries https://github.com/techascent/

gdsdfe3• 6 years ago

Anyone have an idea on the nubank stack in a bit more details?

riadvargas2• 6 years ago

Here you can get a somewhat updated view on Nubank's stack: https://stackshare.io/nubank/nubank

gdsdfe3• 6 years ago

Yeah thanks I saw this page ... I was just trying to understand the Plataformatec acquisition and how it fits in the stack

jfbaro• 6 years ago

I hope Nubank opens source DATOMIC... it would benefit a lot from community work.

huahaiy• 6 years ago

Congratulations! Does this mean that there is a chance for Datomic to be open sourced?

stopachka2• 6 years ago

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!

unexaminedlife• 6 years ago

"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.

jacobsmith19842• 6 years ago

Now there is a conflict of interest in Cognitect cloud services. Would you trust a bank watch over your strategic information?

vemv2• 6 years ago

Their Cloud offering is provided as a template, they're not a SaaS/IaaS

https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/getting-started/start-system....

christophilus• 6 years ago

Yes.

zeendo• 6 years ago

It sure would be funny if Nubank was the company from Neal Ford's story about someone sneaking Clojure into an enterprise years ago by claiming it was "just a Java library".

I doubt it is but would be a pretty funny tie in.

moocowtruck3• 6 years ago

i actually did this at a large enterprise, when i left the person taking up my mantle asked 'so this is just java right' I said 'uh ya you just include the jar and write the code like this' :D

namelosw• 6 years ago

Wow, congratulations!

I wonder, would this lead to open source Datomic in one day?

ncmncm• 6 years ago

I encountered a surprising remark recently: someone said they had no interest in Clojure because it is proprietary.

In what way is it proprietary? Do Clojure programs depend on a runtime distributed with a restrictive license?

puredanger9• 6 years ago

It's not proprietary. Clojure is under the EPL 1.0 (Eclipse Public License), which is intended to be a business-friendly copy-left license.

Nubank acquires Cognitect

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