Nubank acquires Cognitect • Hacker News Board

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#171

Post by lvh » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

clj_throwaway wrote: post #39

myth_drannon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.)

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#172

Post by lvh » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

clj_throwaway wrote: post #158

monsieurbanana wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#173

Post by randompwd » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #163

jonahbenton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#174

Post by kureikain » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #115

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?

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#175

Post by stopachka » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

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!

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#176

Post by stopachka » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #109

andrenth wrote: post #62

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 m…

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.…

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)

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#177

Post by moon2 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

orolle wrote: post #59

scribu wrote: 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…

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/...

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#178

Post by ilikehurdles » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

clj_throwaway wrote: post #27

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'…

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#179

Post by ilikehurdles » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

clj_throwaway wrote: post #158

monsieurbanana wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#180

Post by lukashrb » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

randompwd wrote: post #173

jwr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.