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Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help Rich's retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-so-insider joke here) I ha
by tom_b 6y ago
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.
- keeganpoppen 6y ago(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 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321)
- gdsdfe 6y agoOh wow! I didn't know that
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- swyx 6y agogotta ask - what did he do after 2009? is he alright now?
- puredanger 6y agoHe became the CTO of Cognitect. :) He's doing great.
- dkersten 6y agoHe did a community drive in 2009/2010 or so and a lot of us pitched in a little. Then he joined forces with Relevance to create Cognitect and that has funded his Clojure development since. Hopefully he gets a nice payday from this acquisition too.
- microcolonel 6y agoRich Hickey is an artist and a hero, I owe him so much.