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Nubank acquires Cognitect

cognitect.com

91–100 of 281 posts

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#91
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any relevant links to share about this?

Perhaps: Standard Chartered Singapore? I tried unsuccessfully to get a job with them about 4-5 years ago. They are a huge Haskell shop.

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#92
post #20

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?

As a counter example, Stripe uses Ruby and Mongo.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#93
post #73
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any relevant links to share about this?

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

Coincidentally, Walmart also maintains a lot of clojure libraries now, including the go-to graphql implementation in clojure: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#94

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

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#95
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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), a…

Funny, I left Cider for Cursive a few years ago, because back then, Cursive had the better cljs support.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#96
post #59
post #20

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?

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 o…

> 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?

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#97
post #86

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 h…

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?

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#98
> 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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#99
post #20

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?

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#100
post #96
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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?

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.
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