Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help Rich's retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-so-insider joke here)<p>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).<p>This acquisition is more abstractly interesting to me in that a <i>VERY</i> 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.<p>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.
Nubank has a very inspiring story, both for engineers that are fans of Clojure & Datomic and for entrepreneurs that want to do "crazy" things like entering the bank sector.<p>This must be very validating and exciting for both Cognitect and Nubank.<p>I'm excited of the future impact on Clojure and Datomic. I get the impression that _all_[0] involved parties deeply care about what made them great so far.<p>[0] I'm getting that vibe based on some talks I saw of Lucas Cavalcanti and Edward Wible, available on Youtube.
Nubank’s co-founder and CTO offers his perspective: <a href="https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-nubank/" rel="nofollow">https://building.nubank.com.br/welcoming-cognitect-nubank/</a>
My 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.<p>Until now, I've been getting nothing but excellence from the Clojure team: not just great tools, but also great thinking behind them. I appreciate what I've gotten (for free!) until now, and hope that the trend will continue :-)
Did anyone else notice that the biggest non-academic supporters of functional programming seem to be financial institutions?<p>Is it due to the nature of the problem space? Is it because finance people tend to be more analytical? Something else?
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).<p>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.<p>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)
Good for them, well deserved success for the principles, Clojure, and Datomic!<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://cookingspace.com" rel="nofollow">http://cookingspace.com</a>
Wonder if this makes datomic more likely to become free/open source<p>Not sure what their license revenue is but hard to imagine it would be significant to a major fintech
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.
The bull case here is if Nubank goes full Amazon and uses banking as a beachhead to create the next layer up from AWS, which Clojure/Datomic is amazingly perfect for – data all the things
Nubank is one of the biggest startups in Brazil and I am a Nubank customer and I must say they have the best service available. Treating customers as customers.
Congratulations team! I remember watching the Nubank infoq talk, and sensing that they have a serious hacker culture.<p>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!
> Nubank has grown to 600 Clojure developers, running 2.5 million lines of Clojure code in 500 microservices<p>Wow, that's enormous especially for a concise language like Clojure. Very happy about this announcement as a Clojure user. Sounds like it's going to be viable for at least another decade.
Case you’re curious, Nubank has done the same thing for the Elixir language!<p><a href="http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-information-about-our-elixir-and-ruby-open-source-projects/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-informati...</a>
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).<p>I'm looking for things like how to refactor safely in the absence of static typing, for example. Do they make use of spec?<p>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 much. Maybe with Clojure is the same?
I'm just remembering the sad collapse of RethinkDB...<p>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.<p>Can also say that everyone I've met at nubank are really passionate about the ecosystem and seem like they'll be excellent partners
"Explicitly constraining and mitigating certain categories of complexity was likely to pay off in the medium and long term."<p>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.<p>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.
I am genuinely curious. I haven't heard the name Cognitect before. I checked the website and they seem like another software consultancy firm. Anything I am missing? HN is very picky, so they must be doing something special.
what does this mean for the future of clojure?<p>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)
Does this mean Closure will continue to become more and more server/web focused?<p>I could have the wrong impression, but from all the dead libraries I've come across it feels like it used to be all over the place with people doing math, visualizations/art, music, people trying to run on Android (seemingly the only JVM language that has no Android ecosystem/workflow.. crazy) etc.. Now a lot of that has atrophied and looks like it's mostly all about web. Though there are still interesting nonweb things going on - it just feels like a shrinking fraction<p>Either way, a big congrats to the people involved. Happy for you guys. That you for all your hard work, the beautiful language that has made me enjoy programming more than ever, and all for free :)
Throwaway account, for obvious reasons.<p>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?<p>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.<p>I expect that I'll have to be looking for a new job in a year's time :-(
It sure would be funny if Nubank was the company from Neal Ford's story about someone sneaking Clojure into an enterprise years ago by claiming it was "just a Java library".<p>I doubt it is but would be a pretty funny tie in.
I encountered a surprising remark recently: someone said they had no interest in Clojure because it is proprietary.<p>In what way is it proprietary? Do Clojure programs depend on a runtime distributed with a restrictive license?
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.
> From their start in 2013, Nubank has grown to 600 Clojure developers, running 2.5 million lines of Clojure code in 500 microservices on over 2000 Datomic servers.<p>Yikes that sounds like hell. Let's stop bragging about costs as a succeess store? Headcount? LoC? microservices? These are all to be <i>minimized</i>.