Live data from Hacker News

Nubank acquires Cognitect

cognitect.com

191–200 of 281 posts

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#191

can one make a career out of clojure?

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#192
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.

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#193
post #88

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.

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…

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#195
post #159
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ple…

Aren’t “rollbacks” done as separate transactions, that return account amount to Previous value?

Depends on the legal requirements of that rollback

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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?

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#197
"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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#198
post #88

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.

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…

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Outside of the license, OF COURSE Relevance, then Cognitect, now nubank owns clojure, in every other way that matters. Now do datomic :-)

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...

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#200

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

And telecommunications companies don't see their technology as a competitive advantage?
Post reply on HN