In the US for example, banks not only contribute to federal insurance but also have built joint private reserves to weather economic turmoil. In the modern world banks rarely go bankrupt because if they did that would tank any confidence in the economy and create incredible chaos.

Even in failed states like Venezuela banks are still a major pillar of economy confidence.

did you miss how the banks all had to be bailed out a few years back?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-defaul...

Well. Except they are. In the US not only at the federal level but also at the state level:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance

- https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corp...

- https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/business/bank-earnings-defaul...

Here's the list of banks that have failed in the US and for which their deposits entered receivership managed by the FDIC; looks like a handful every year: https://www.fdic.gov/Bank/individual/failed/banklist.html

Yes banks can fail and they can go bankrupt, and if that happens to Nubank then this acquisition goes to hell which makes the Clojure ecosystem weaker. I give that to OP.

But saying that banks are "very very" fragile institutions I think is fundamentally wrong.

And the function of the regulator is to stop and DISSOLVE the bank BEFORE it goes potentially too deep into the pocket of deposit insurance fund in case of running astray. So this is a social instrument but again does not solve the institutional risk problem. Maybe, just maybe makes some banks more paranoid, but they still blow up at very high pace.

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" perspective- there are a lot of definitions of fragility, but when looking at attributes like- may fail at any time; may lose customer assets; may take on inappropriate risks given their systemic position; have negative systemic impact on larger financial system operations- whatever attributes you think of, the amount of energy that goes into oversight around those attributes is significantly larger for banks than any other "systemic" industry (real estate, health, whatever).

The number of health oversight agencies in the US is, like, 5. The number of financial oversight agencies is in the dozens, just at the federal level. (This is why in the US you sue for medical malpractice but not financial malpractice, and why there is government backed financial insurance of various kinds and much less health insurance. You are on your own in the health industry. In finance there are armies around).

Banks have like 10 different kinds of risk that they and their supervision are monitoring for. Yes, banks fail, but that's because people suck and are bad at things and the second law of thermodynamics and so forth. It isn't necessarily the same in other countries but banking, like many other industries, is increasingly global, and banking core systems are increasingly international.

Nubank is clearly doing a LOT of things right- I saw a presentation in person from them in February and it blew my mind the level of capability and abstraction they were working at. They are a solid entity with a strong growth path.

Cognitect, in contrast, is a tiny consulting firm. Maybe 50 employees? Technical consulting at scale is an incredibly hard business, particularly when your solution domain is limited to a particular toolchain. There was really no chance Cognitect was ever going to become Thoughtworks, or Deloitte, or anyone like that. That's an infinitely more fragile financial situation for Clojure than living under the roof of a business with a valuation in the billions.

The way to think about this is that all technologies have a sponsor. Clojure moves from basically being sponsored by a guy in his backyard to, like PHP (Etsy has a market cap of around $10B and employs the PHP leader). That's huge.

Beyond that, having what should become a more well known and reputable player in the financial industry backing it- you could well see A LOT MORE adoption from enterprises playing copycat. It's not going to happen right away, but it is a seminal step in COMPLETELY changing the enterprise adoption calculation.

However, everything is a tradeoff. 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. It isn't going to become a lot of other things that it could become. The finance industry has a fondness for languages with weird syntax, and those languages often stay in the finance industry niche. That's probably where Clojure stays. There are all sorts of wicked cool JVM things like LMAX and Azul that are also financial industry specific, and Clojure and Datomic get to become one of those. Very successful, very cool, but niche.

Anyway- hope that's helpful, happy to continue the conversation.

Cheers.

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 that Clojure creator being employed by a bank makes Clojure a worse choice outside finance.

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.

And this is also one of the reasons I think having sole bank as your owner is a really really bad thing.

Are their financial reports available and published in English? Would be interesting to read.

I don't know details of their financial model, but will say:

* there is a long bootstrap process for a bank that involves being selective with what customers they can serve with what products at what margins in what order

* debt is a hard game, though in many niches now is the best of times

* currency is also a hard game

* in general, banks are valued at a small multiple of assets and do not attract VC

* in general, SAAS businesses are valued at a large multiple of revenue and do attract VC

So my assumption would be that they are using equity to build the ability to get into the banking core business as a SAAS, which is both lucrative and exploding as an opportunity (see recent nCino news). If they succeed, that's an extremely durable business, and not a bad place for Clojure to be. There are a number of languages that still only "exist" because they form the basis of a banking core.

Cheers. Thanks for the engagement.

Unfortunately we don't publish in EN yet, I'll give this feedback for the next one.