Nubank acquires Cognitect • Hacker News Board

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#81

Post by tom_b » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help Rich's retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-so-insider joke here)

I have had the pleasure of "using Clojure in anger" and for a few years was very dedicated to learning how to use it effectively. This was a significant step up for my general programming skills and the simplicity of the language often saved me from myself with respect to bad design or choices in code. Whatever programmer "maturity" I can claim is probably due to Clojure and teaching introductory programming and databases (not with Clojure and Datomic to be clear).

This acquisition is more abstractly interesting to me in that a VERY dedicated Clojure/Datomic company made it. We didn't see here, for lack of a better example, a FAANG company grabbing Cognitect. That may have been a choice! Maybe Cognitect went with an acquisition where they retain a high degree of autonomy with the benefits of being acquired.

I never made the leap into a larger organization with Clojure at its core. I was able to use Clojure only in my small shop where I have a small degree of autonomy on development language choice. For a few years, I was somewhat actively seeking an opportunity to join a larger Clojure-oriented team but struggled to gain much traction when applying to openings. It seems possible to build a Clojure career, but I've not been very good at that.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#82

Post by clj_throwaway » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

xmlblog wrote: post #69

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'…

> Who is really going to be interested in building on top of tech owned by a (new, unknown, regional) bank? As opposed to building on top of tech "owned" by a small software consultancy? Perhaps I simply lack imagination, but how is this worse?

We all know the history of acquihires. Key tech and products inevitably are swallowed, never seen outside again.

Besides that, datomic really is a great solution for banks and fintech....are other firms like that going to buy from another bank, maybe a competitor?

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#83

Post by fulafel » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

bhurlow wrote: post #76

I'm just remembering the sad collapse of RethinkDB... The task of making a viable commercial database in 2020 is herculean and I can really empathize with the team's need to both keep cashflow and have a sufficiently sized deployment to debug against. Can also say that everyone I've met at nubank are really passionate about the ecosystem and seem like they'll be excellent partners

Datomic is 8+ years old and by all accounts has a healthy customer base, it's not like they are in the takeoff stage. But of course they have to keep up like everyone else, especially now that there is competition from the OSS side (Crux).

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#84

Post by keeganpoppen » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

tom_b wrote: post #81

Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help Rich's retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-so-insider joke here) I have had the pleasure of "using Clojure in anger" and for a few years was very dedicated to learning how to use it effectively. This was a significant step up for my general programming skills and the simplicity of the language often saved me from myself with respe…

(for anyone who doesn't get it, Rich funded Clojure development via his retirement savings from 2005 until he ran out in 2009 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321)

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#85

Post by robertfw » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

bhurlow wrote: post #76

I'm just remembering the sad collapse of RethinkDB... The task of making a viable commercial database in 2020 is herculean and I can really empathize with the team's need to both keep cashflow and have a sufficiently sized deployment to debug against. Can also say that everyone I've met at nubank are really passionate about the ecosystem and seem like they'll be excellent partners

I remember being very excited by RethinkDB, it was a huge shame to see that go down. I feel like they signed their own death warrant by making a product that was super easy to use and was well documented.. so no support contracts, because simply not needed. Such a shame.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#86

Post by juskrey » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

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 having a choice between having to conform or quit the only money source.

I am not discussing personalities here - people are free to choose how to sell their products or themselves. Just thinking what this means to me as a software consultant who makes 100% of money from Clojure (yes, a fragile single choice because of sort of falling in love)

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#87

Post by pea » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:52 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?

In haskell, a lot of the uptake in financial services is because they are writing internal DSLs to do things like modelling exotic options.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#88

Post by tom_b » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

tomconnors wrote: post #41

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 the max(timestamp) for that tuple along with the tuple having a deleted flag value of 'N'. This means that any select only sees the most recent tuple value for a GUID if it hasn't been "deleted".

There was a little bit more hiding in there to handle dirty writes.

But this worked very well for my requirements. By really only doing inserts, I was able to do similar "point in time" looks at the db as an immutable value.

Fun stuff.

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#89

Post by dbancajas » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

can one make a career out of clojure?

Re: Nubank acquires Cognitect

#90

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

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.