Nubank acquires Cognitect • Hacker News Board

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#51

Post by dgb23 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

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?

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#52

Post by jcadam » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

puredanger wrote: post #40

kamaal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also lets hope they acquire cursive ide too and offer it for free. Clojure deserves an IDE for larger adoption.

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), and Clojurescript (re-frame) for the frontend (because it offers a big win over javascript there). I've taken a step back from full Clojure for everything, being that I have to work with others who aren't as in to "alternative" languages as I am.

Datomic is something I probably won't mess with until (and if) it becomes open source.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#53

Post by halostatue » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

kgraves wrote: post #2

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)

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#54

Post by bhurlow » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

Joe8Bit wrote: post #50

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?

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.

any relevant links to share about this?

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#55

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

bhurlow wrote: post #25

bananaface wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

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

[deleted]

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#56

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

clj_throwaway wrote: post #37

mr_custard wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

[deleted]

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#57

Post by mark_l_watson » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

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

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#58

Post by mark_l_watson » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

bhurlow wrote: post #54

Joe8Bit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#59

Post by orolle » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

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 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.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#60

Post by dig1 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

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?

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.