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.
23 million customers disagree
Nubank acquires Cognitect
211–220 of 281 posts
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#213Earlier 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…
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…
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.
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#214My 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…
"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.
I would rephrase and ask why he claim his business would not exists without Clojure/ClojureScript :)
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I would rephrase and ask why he claim his business would not exists without Clojure/ClojureScript :)
Yeah, seems like a cultish thing to say.
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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" perspectiv…
“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…
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.
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#217Earlier 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…
Platform war phenomenon (like Xbox vs Playstation) emerge from winner-take-most effects with a high upfront investment, so you want to make sure you pick a winner and then once invested you want to help them win. A good example of what happens when you lose is the Nintendo Wii U which had like 8 games made for it.
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#218Now there is a conflict of interest in Cognitect cloud services. Would you trust a bank watch over your strategic information?
Their Cloud offering is provided as a template, they're not a SaaS/IaaS
https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/getting-started/start-system....
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#219Now there is a conflict of interest in Cognitect cloud services. Would you trust a bank watch over your strategic information?
Yes.
Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect
#220AWS has Quantum Ledger DB, which is a lot like what nubank architected on top of datomic. Anyone know what language qldb is built on ?
I believe the intersection of use cases for QLDB and Datomic is the empty set.