Episode: 2817
Title: HPR2817: Are you successful? Click to find out more!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2817/hpr2817.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:15:00

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This in HPR episode 2008-117 entitled Are You Successful? Click to find out more.
It is hosted by Clacket and in about 5 minutes long and carrying a clean flag. The summary is the answer may surprise you.
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Hi, I'm Clacket. One of my heroes is Alexander Boga or that's his name in his passport. Of course his real name because that's the name he uses on IRC is Regenaksa.
He's the author of PicoLisp. I was on the PicoLisp channel on FreeNode two years ago and some dude bro popped in and it was clear from context that this was not the first time this particular person was there.
He berated a project for not having a git repo and not having an issue tracker and why is everything so unconventional? Why isn't the language compiled? That's so stupid.
He continued to say that if this project would just hang out more on hacker news and attract more people on GitHub, more users would come to the language and the language would be successful.
And here's what Regenaksa replied. He has been using it to earn money for three decades. PicoLisp came out in 1988.
And some other people have been using the language too professionally and he enjoys working in it. It solves exactly the problems he set out to solve when he created the programming language.
It has the performance it needs to have and if you need more performance you can always drop down in C. The C integration with PicoLisp is very good.
And it has a nice community. The IRC channel has a bunch of people who like solving problems with PicoLisp and discuss the language and generally hanging out in the channel and discussing all kinds of things.
So there's nothing that really needs to change here. He's satisfied with how PicoLisp and the community works.
So I come back to that conversation quite often because people talk so much about making things successful.
And this is an interesting counterpoint and Haskell has a similar idea where the Haskell motto is avoid success at any cost.
Although I've been told that the parentheses are actually avoid success at any cost. Like success is desirable but you cannot sacrifice too many other things to reach it.
You do not want to achieve success by sacrificing things that are actually core to the project.
So this five minute exchange on IRC in the beginning of 2017 that will probably stay with me for the rest of my life because it's so important.
You define what success means.
One project I can think of that is hugely successful and doesn't have millions of users or millions of dollars coming in is hacker public radio.
I've been listening to hacker public radio at hacker public radio not a work.
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