Cognitect Blog

Sponsoring Open Source Developers

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 03:00:00 -0500

We are pleased to announce today that Cognitect and Nubank will be sponsoring dozens of contributors to the Clojure ecosystem with regular monthly support.

Open source is a critical part of the economy but it is an ecosystem still without a viable economic model.

Open source development feels like devs giving to devs, and that is the popular narrative. The reality is: most companies are taking economic advantage of the generous spirit of open source developers. That needs to stop. The value of programs, and thus of programming and people who pursue it as a profession, is eroding. Little of the vast wealth derived from open source flows intentionally and systematically to its creators. This is neither fair nor sustainable.

Open source licenses effectively preclude developers from charging for their work. Nevertheless, companies should pay for it.

Imagine if every company using open source were to provide tangible sponsorship, on an ongoing basis, directly to the developers of the open source libraries and tools they use and rely upon. Sponsorship should be an expected and manageable cost of doing business and would have a tremendous impact on the nature of open source development and the lives of those who pursue it.

With ongoing sponsorship, open source devs could move away from the gamification and RPG-like narratives around craft and guilds (rewarded with stars and likes) and actually be considered professional, independent craftspeople. People could work full-time pursuing their open source visions. Leaders of popular projects with large user bases and commensurate support demands could hire people to help them. Companies would be assured that these non-employees, who contribute critically to their business, are able to pay their bills, afford health care, educate their kids, buy houses and have a life, just as they do with their employees.

This sponsorship represents a six-figure per year investment, and part of our attempt to walk this talk. We encourage other companies to join us in valuing and supporting the open source developers who contribute to our business success.

Rich, Stu and Justin

Cognitect dev-tools

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 04:00:00 -0400

We're excited to release Cognitect dev-tools, a set of free tools that we've created for Clojure developers. Today's initial release of dev-tools includes:

REBL, a graphical, interactive tool for browsing Clojure data.
Datomic dev-local, a library for developing and testing Datomic applications.

We hope that providing these tools in a single place makes it easier for Clojurists to get started. We find the dev-tools to be indispensable in our daily Clojure workflow, and are sharing them with the community to encourage exploration and adoption of Clojure.

Cognitect Joins Nubank

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 04:09:16 -0400

We are thrilled to announce that Cognitect is joining the Nubank family of companies. This is the next step in a long relationship, and opens new opportunities for Clojure and Datomic worldwide.

Simplicity at Scale

Nubank is a spectacular success story for Clojure and Datomic, running mission-critical software at scale. 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. Cognitect has been there every step of the way, helping Nubank's developers translate Clojure's ideas into business agility. Nubank is the largest fintech in Latin America and has over 25 million customers using their online financial solutions. We support Nubank's mission of bringing banking to those who do not have it. And in the course of working together in Durham and in São Paulo, we have become friends.

A Bigger Hammock

Nubank is a vocal and public supporter of Clojure and Datomic, and is committed to their growth. Together, we will:

expand the teams behind Clojure and Datomic
offer more conferences, more training, and more resources of every kind
work to improve diversity at Nubank, at Cognitect and across the Clojure community

The Value of Values

Nubank understands the unique value of Clojure and Datomic, and is committed to continuing both without disruption.

Rich will remain at the helm of Clojure, which remains independent, and will continue to manage Clojure's technical direction with Stu and Alex.
Rich and Stu will continue as Datomic architect and product lead, respectively.
Cognitect will continue to operate as a U.S. C Corporation.
Datomic development, product offerings, and customer relationships will continue and grow.
Cognitect will continue to offer professional services for Datomic customers, but will transition out of general consulting development.

What Comes Next

If you are a Clojure or Datomic user, the resources behind your software are greater than ever before. The next Datomic feature will come a bit sooner. We are dedicated to growing the Clojure community, and helping companies adopt and succeed with Clojure.

Thanks!

Justin, Rich, and Stu

Cognitect and PICI

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400

One of the hardest problems in the fight against cancer is pulling the results of hundreds of scientific studies and clinical trials together into a single holistic picture of the disease. This is exactly the problem that researchers at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI) have tackled with CANDEL, the Cancer Data and Evidence Library.

Our goal was to build a unified database for Cancer Immunotherapy research, spanning complex and constantly evolving data, that we could use as a foundation for reproducible analysis tools. We are excited to work with Datomic due to its flexible information modeling, schema adaptability, API ergonomics, and immutability, which allows us to have reproducible analysis results.

Pier Federico Gherardini and Lacey Kitch of PICI

Built using both Clojure and Datomic, the goal of CANDEL is to enable researchers to predict which patients might respond to which combinations of immunotherapy treatments. A key part of CANDEL is a generalized mechanism to incorporate new results into a single data model that allows researchers to investigate different treatment approaches across multiple domains. This model and Datomic’s powerful querying capabilities uniquely empowers researchers to discover new treatments and insights via cross-study analysis.

In addition, CANDEL also provides a suite of tools to enable researchers to create custom CANDEL databases for exploratory work, prepare new data for inclusion, and process data in R to leverage machine learning and data visualization.

Cognitect is proud to have partnered with PICI on this effort.

Supporting Open Source Developers

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Cognitect derives enormous value from our use of open source, only some of which we write ourselves. We believe that companies that derive economic benefit from using open source should directly support and sustain the developers responsible for the software they use. Open source developers have families to feed, kids to educate, and bills to pay.

Instead of treating open source as a common good, companies should think of it as a utility - something you consume all the time for which you should be paying on an ongoing basis. Cognitect is proud to sponsor David Nolen and Mike Fikes, on a recurring basis, for their work on the development and maintenance of ClojureScript. We encourage companies who have built their products with ClojureScript to do the same. Or find the developers responsible for the software that you use, and sponsor them, not once but every month.

In creating the Sponsors program Github has made it straightforward to compensate open source developers directly. Most companies already have accounts with GitHub and established means of paying them. GitHub handles putting money into individual developers' accounts. Just click on that "<3 Sponsor" button and choose a level. It goes on your bill - nothing extra to do.

We look forward to sponsoring more developers whose work is important to Cognitect.

Cognitect Support for Clojure Events

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Cognitect (formerly Relevance) has run many Clojure events since 2010. The first Conj was put together for the rapidly growing Clojure community in the early days of Clojure and it became an annual event run primarily on the east coast of the US. In 2012 and 2013, Alex Miller started and ran Clojure/west as an independent event, later becoming a Cognitect event after Alex joined Cognitect. EuroClojure was created by the European Clojure community and run by Marco Abis, then transitioned into a Cognitect event in 2015.

Throughout, the goal has to been to provide places for Clojurists to gather and talk about their favorite language, provide opportunities to learn and share tools, techniques, and successful experiences. In the last few years, we've seen the rise of many great new Clojure community events in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Bangalore, Leuven, Toronto, New Orleans, and some online as well.

Moving forward, Cognitect will continue to produce the Clojure/conj event on an annual basis every fall. We will discontinue the EuroClojure and Clojure/west events and increase our sponsorship of community conferences, provide speakers as desired, and offer other support as needed for worldwide Clojure community events. If you are a Clojure conference organizer, please contact events@cognitect.com with any questions or requests.

We look forward to seeing you at Clojure events wherever they happen!

State of Clojure 2018 Results

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Welcome to the annual State of Clojure 2018 survey results! Thanks so much for taking the time to check in and provide your feedback. We are very fortunate to have data for some of these questions going all the way back to 2010, giving us a long view on how the data is trending. This year, we had 2325 respondents, about the same as last year.

Rapid Uptake of Clojure 1.9

With the release of Clojure 1.9 in December, we expected to see a shift in version usage, and we did. 72% of developers are already using it with about 60% still using Clojure 1.8 as well. Only a small (6%) number of developers are still using versions 1.7 or older.

We also keep an eye on JDK usage. Uptake of Java 1.9, released last year, has been a bit slower with only 29% adopting Java 1.9 so far and 88% of developers using Java 1.8. Only 6% of developers are using Java 1.7 and less than 1% are still using Java 1.6.

In the editor/IDE world we saw some consolidation this year with both Emacs (50%) and IntelliJ/Cursive (29%) making gains. All other editors saw decreases, although there is still a lot of interesting innovation happening around Atom and VS Code, which was not included but saw a lot of mentions in the comments (~5% of total respondents) - will definitely add next year!

In the ClojureScript world, Figwheel continues to dominate as a critical part of most ClojureScript developer's REPL workflow (76%). Clojurists Together is a new community effort to support open source projects in the community and they have been funding work on Figwheel among other projects. Lumo was a new REPL option this year and made a strong showing of 12%.

In CLJS target environments, we saw an increase of +6% targeting Node (to 29%) and +4% targeting Lambda (to 13%) - both things to watch.

In the build tooling world, the entry of the clj tool is driving a lot of reevaluation and change right now. With so many things in flux, this area is sure to evolve significantly in 2018 and it will be interesting to see where we are in 2019. One important omission in the choices this year was shadow-cljs. There were a lot of mentions in the comments and it's clearly an important tool for many to build and deploy - we'll be sure to add it next year.

Interest surging from JavaScript programmers

When we look at which language communities people are coming from, those answers have been remarkably stable for years, but there was significant movement this year for JavaScript (which vaulted over both Python and Ruby). Clearly people are finding ClojureScript (and its strong resonance with React) as an interesting and viable alternative to JavaScript.

As to where Clojurists hang out, we saw significant increases in use of Reddit (+5%) and Slack (+4%) and some decreases in use of the Clojure mailing lists, IRC, and attendance at both in-person and on-line conferences. One new choice added this year was the ClojureVerse Discourse server - it seems to be a useful midpoint between Slack (high volume live chat) and mailing lists (low volume asynchronous discussion). This was a new option yet 17% of respondents reported using it.

Clojure and ClojureScript used in many domains and industries

One of the things we are always watching is the trend of people using Clojure for their day-to-day work. This year, we continued to see about 2/3 of respondents using Clojure for work (compare that to the very first survey back in 2010 when less than 1/3 were doing so). Web development has always been the most dominant domain - in 2010, 53% were doing web dev and these days fully 82% of Clojure devs are involved in some kind of web development (not surprising given how many Clojure devs are using both Clojure and ClojureScript together).

When looking at the industries using Clojure, we added a few choices this year based on prominent results in last year's "Other" category - entertainment (3%), energy/utility (2%), automotive/manufacturing (2%). We also saw a noticeable increase (+3%) in Financial services. Perhaps due to the new choices, we saw small decreases in the largest and most generic categories, enterprise software and consumer software.

Interest in hiring stays strong

There are several questions about how Clojure and ClojureScript should change or be prioritized for improvement. The results are largely similar to prior years, although the question format changed a little making it hard to directly compare every detail. The top result is clearly error messages though - while spec has started us down a road, that is still a work in progress which will continue this year. Many people have been using the Expound library for taking spec error output and making the data easier to read.

Hiring and staffing is always an interesting one to watch and that increased this year. We often see the seemingly contradictory dual complaints of companies that need more people and developers that have a hard time finding positions. To a large degree this is either a mismatch in the geographic distribution of jobs and people and/or a mismatch in needs and skill levels. It has been very encouraging to see so many large teams growing and hiring of late though.

The need for more docs and tutorials is also one that has gone up and down over the years and seems to be up again this year. While there are a wealth of resources for new Clojure developers now in every format, it is also sometimes difficult for people to find just the right resource for their experience level and need. There have been many good discussions lately about this and lots of active work in the community.

In general, there have been so many new tools, learning resources, companies, etc of late that it's hard to keep up - 2018 is going to be a great year for Clojure!

Check out the data

If you'd like to dig into the full results, you can find the complete set of data from this and former years here:

2018, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010

Note that we are doing the survey about every 14 months so the last survey occurred in late 2016 rather than 2017.

Thanks again for being part of the community!

2018 State of Clojure Community Survey Now Open

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

It's time for the annual State of Clojure Community survey!

If you are a user of Clojure or ClojureScript, we are greatly interested in your responses to the following survey:

State of Clojure 2018

The survey contains four pages:

General questions applicable to any user of Clojure or ClojureScript
Questions specific to JVM Clojure (skip if not applicable)
Questions specific to ClojureScript (skip if not applicable)
Final comments

The survey will close February 9th. All of the data will be released in February. We are greatly appreciative of your input!

Clojure 1.9

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Clojure 1.9 is now available!

Clojure 1.9 introduces two major new features: integration with spec and command line tools.

spec (rationale, guide) is a library for describing the structure of data and functions with support for:

Validation
Error reporting
Destructuring
Instrumentation
Test-data generation
Generative test generation
Documentation

Clojure integrates spec via two new libraries (still in alpha):

spec.alpha - spec implementation
core.specs.alpha - specifications for Clojure itself

This modularization facilitates refinement of spec separate from the Clojure release cycle.

The command line tools (getting started, guide, reference) provide:

Quick and easy install
Clojure REPL and runner
Use of Maven and local dependencies
A functional API for classpath management (tools.deps.alpha)

The installer is available for Mac developers in brew, for Linux users in a script, and for more platforms in the future.

For more information, see the complete list of all changes in Clojure 1.9 for more details.

Contributors

Thanks to all of the community members who contributed to Clojure 1.9 (first time contributors in bold):

Adam Clements
Andy Fingerhut
Brandon Bloom
Cameron Desautels
Chad Taylor
Chris Houser
David Bürgin
Eli Lindsey
Gerrit Jansen Van Vuuren
Ghadi Shayban
Greg Leppert
Jason Whitlark
Johan Mena
Jozef Wagner
Lee Yen-Chin
Matthew Boston
Michael Blume
Michał Marczyk
Nicola Mometto
Ruslan Al-Fakikh
Steffen Dienst
Steve Miner
Yegor Timoshenko
Zhuang XiaoDan

Full Schedule and Speaker Lineup for Conj 2017 Announced

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We are very pleased to announce the full schedule and the speaker lineup for this year's Conj. We're excited about the program: Guy Steele, Rich Hickey, Stu Halloway, Carin Meier, and many more will be helping celebrate the 10th anniversary of the launch of Clojure.

In addition to the talks, we'll have unsessions, an after-party, and this year we're introducing a pre-party and game night on Wednesday night.

We are looking forward to the program, but mostly to seeing everybody at the show. If you haven't already, you can register here. See you in October!