> This included what was probably the most interesting part, writing the tricky recursive code to implement the match statement.
Back in school I found this book[0], "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages". Flipping through it was very neat because it kinda demystified the nuts and bolts of implementing the "fancier" functional programming features for me.
Chapter 5 is about implementing pattern matching.
You read this kind of stuff and realize how easy things become when you just tackle a problem with the right mindset and abstractions. And this is a book from 1987! We've always had decent answers for a lot of the stuff.
I think it's interesting to flip through if you're a language implementer, though helps to be comfortable with reading some stuff sideways and not understanding every detail.
A lot of the better books in every domain have been written in the Golden age of the modern world, i.e. 1950-1988.
As soon as the 90's entered, quality started to worsen. At around the same time, porn began making inroads into the world.
I know some porn-loving midwit will downvote this answer, but the more I look for signs of human degradation, the more I find porn as the main culprit.
I say this because some decades ago, I had a neighbor who was a cheerful, enthusiastic and can-do-attitude fella, who would grow all sorts of flowers, fruits in his patch of land, and there were also some fruit trees he had planted. He wasn't into reading and this was his main pastime, this and chatting with others, and going on long walks.
A few years later his son got him a mobile phone and a large TV. His son would often tell me how he'd quarrel with his dad because he would stay up watching female wrestling. After a while, I suspect he also discovered porn.
Some years later, I went back home and visited them. The garden had been abandoned, weeds grew all over the place, the trees were left to themselves, there were no flowers. The old man had a distant, depressed look, like a drug-addict, but somewhat shiny eyes. He was curt and no longer went for long walks.
But TV, he watched all the time, mostly at night, and then spent the days sleeping all the day long. I am not sure if he had been watching porn, but half-naked women wrestling on TV is almost as bad.
I think there's a lot more to be blamed on a planet that's getting hotter, pesticides in the food, lead in the soil, plastic in the food containers, hormones in the meat and cheese, and cost of living that goes up while salaries don't. Social trust is at an all time low. 99% of the population gets poorer everyday and can feel it. There's no hope of things getting better, so yeah plenty of people stop doing enriching activities.
Porn isn't the cause, it's a symptom of a population losing hope that things will be better for their kids. Or that can't afford kids at all.
This is slopulism, aka you read social media too much and got depression.
> 99% of the population gets poorer everyday and can feel it.
Absolutely not true in the US. What did happen is that poor people's incomes vastly increased since 2019, while upper middle class incomes stagnated.
It may of course be true in some countries.
> Or that can't afford kids at all.
Birth rates declining is a sign of increased incomes, because people can afford entertainment, and prefer to consume it over having kids, which are kind of a bummer and mean you can't have fun for the next 18 years.
Reading this conjured some feelings in me. At various points in my career, I’ve wanted to take a sabbatical and go to RC. Having spent the last year in the agentic coding world, the idea of writing code by hand seems quaint and outdated. Many have spoken of this feeling of loss so I’m not saying anything new here, but for some reason reading about RC in 2026 specifically cemented the idea that I’ll probably never write anything by hand again.
> The goal of the game is to give hints to a secret word without giving the same hint as another player; it was shocking how often all the agents playing would give the same hint, even at temperature 1. We resolved this by giving them all “personalities” which were really just topics; for example we’d be telling one agent to think about things in the context of sports, so their clue for “shell” might be “defense” or something, whereas the agent told to be a hippie might say “cancer” for the zodiac’s crab.
Mode-collapse is characteristic of pretty much all chatbots post-davinci-002 and a major challenge to anything creative or game-like.
Has there been a business started based on work done there? Publishable research results? (that second one is actually a pretty low bar, and yet if there is something it is not easily discoverable)
Here is an honest good faith answer to a pretty aggressively hostile question:
Adult daycare is almost the opposite of what Recurse center is. Recurse is largely unstructured: people do what inspires them and make their own plans. You will find more structure, hand holding and mandatory time wastes in virtually any business than you will at Recurse Center.
A 12 week batch is not a lot of time to carry out a major research project, but it is generally not intended to treat this as a start up incubator. There are other places for that kind of activity. Recurse is a place to freely learn and explore. There are a few companies that have emerged but they are not huge money machines (most companies are not). There is also some interesting research that is done.
Some things that pop into my head immediately are:
Dan Luu's studies of Motion to Photon Latency in keyboard input [1]
Raph Levien's work on Xi [2], and Andrew Kelly's work on Zig [3].
I'm sure there are other people could dig up more examples, but that really isn't the point. A school's purpose is to produce educated people. Recurse is more of an unschool but the aim is to help people learn and think - it should be judged on those terms first and foremost.
From what I see, this is more of a sabbatical time to just explore and enjoy programming without needing a productive end. I've been considering it myself.
I don't get it. Why would you ask if an adult daycare leads to a business or new discoveries? Daycares are for nurturing curiosity and fostering development in a socially engaging environment—much like the Recurse Center—not for publishing papers.
Even if for the sake of argument its conceded it's a "daycare", what's wrong with that? No one's being forced to go there. It's free for the participants. There's no harm in a group that facilitates people exploring what interests them in a setting where others are doing the same.
You are missing the point. On the line between explore and exploit, RC is basically 100% explore. The point is to learn, and more importantly, to flex the muscle of learning without being taught. And to participate in a community of kind and curious people who are also motivated to do the same.
It's weird to say that about a YCombinator-affiliated event on a YCombinator forum. I'm not especially fond of YC but there's pretty clearly potential to make valuable connections in this sphere.
> This included what was probably the most interesting part, writing the tricky recursive code to implement the match statement.
Back in school I found this book[0], "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages". Flipping through it was very neat because it kinda demystified the nuts and bolts of implementing the "fancier" functional programming features for me.
Chapter 5 is about implementing pattern matching.
You read this kind of stuff and realize how easy things become when you just tackle a problem with the right mindset and abstractions. And this is a book from 1987! We've always had decent answers for a lot of the stuff.
I think it's interesting to flip through if you're a language implementer, though helps to be comfortable with reading some stuff sideways and not understanding every detail.
[0] https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-sea...
A lot of the better books in every domain have been written in the Golden age of the modern world, i.e. 1950-1988.
As soon as the 90's entered, quality started to worsen. At around the same time, porn began making inroads into the world.
I know some porn-loving midwit will downvote this answer, but the more I look for signs of human degradation, the more I find porn as the main culprit.
I say this because some decades ago, I had a neighbor who was a cheerful, enthusiastic and can-do-attitude fella, who would grow all sorts of flowers, fruits in his patch of land, and there were also some fruit trees he had planted. He wasn't into reading and this was his main pastime, this and chatting with others, and going on long walks.
A few years later his son got him a mobile phone and a large TV. His son would often tell me how he'd quarrel with his dad because he would stay up watching female wrestling. After a while, I suspect he also discovered porn.
Some years later, I went back home and visited them. The garden had been abandoned, weeds grew all over the place, the trees were left to themselves, there were no flowers. The old man had a distant, depressed look, like a drug-addict, but somewhat shiny eyes. He was curt and no longer went for long walks.
But TV, he watched all the time, mostly at night, and then spent the days sleeping all the day long. I am not sure if he had been watching porn, but half-naked women wrestling on TV is almost as bad.
It was sad to see the change.
Older people have trouble sleeping all night, walking, doing manual labor. Maybe the neighbor just ... transitioned to a different stage of life.
In a completely unrelated thread to the topic you wrote the word porn 5 times. Are you sure it's the neighbours you need to worry about?
I think there's a lot more to be blamed on a planet that's getting hotter, pesticides in the food, lead in the soil, plastic in the food containers, hormones in the meat and cheese, and cost of living that goes up while salaries don't. Social trust is at an all time low. 99% of the population gets poorer everyday and can feel it. There's no hope of things getting better, so yeah plenty of people stop doing enriching activities.
Porn isn't the cause, it's a symptom of a population losing hope that things will be better for their kids. Or that can't afford kids at all.
This is slopulism, aka you read social media too much and got depression.
> 99% of the population gets poorer everyday and can feel it.
Absolutely not true in the US. What did happen is that poor people's incomes vastly increased since 2019, while upper middle class incomes stagnated.
It may of course be true in some countries.
> Or that can't afford kids at all.
Birth rates declining is a sign of increased incomes, because people can afford entertainment, and prefer to consume it over having kids, which are kind of a bummer and mean you can't have fun for the next 18 years.
The Reagan years were a golden age but not the 90s?
Reading this conjured some feelings in me. At various points in my career, I’ve wanted to take a sabbatical and go to RC. Having spent the last year in the agentic coding world, the idea of writing code by hand seems quaint and outdated. Many have spoken of this feeling of loss so I’m not saying anything new here, but for some reason reading about RC in 2026 specifically cemented the idea that I’ll probably never write anything by hand again.
> The goal of the game is to give hints to a secret word without giving the same hint as another player; it was shocking how often all the agents playing would give the same hint, even at temperature 1. We resolved this by giving them all “personalities” which were really just topics; for example we’d be telling one agent to think about things in the context of sports, so their clue for “shell” might be “defense” or something, whereas the agent told to be a hippie might say “cancer” for the zodiac’s crab.
Mode-collapse is characteristic of pretty much all chatbots post-davinci-002 and a major challenge to anything creative or game-like.
This is what school should have been like. Instead, we got factory-style non-thinker exam-taker pencil-pushing excel-cruncher-wannabes.
Always wanted to do this. Anyone attend from India remotely?
I always shudder hearing about RC. It feels like both wrong ends of career and hobby intersecting and the whole experience sounds dank and clammy.
I am sorry about the negative feelings and associations you have towards RC. Let's think constructively: What are 1-2 points you would do differently?
Really? Why? Sounds like an ideal way to spend a sabbatical to me!
Let me guess: the webpage simply contains a link to itself.
This place sounds like an adult daycare.
Has there been a business started based on work done there? Publishable research results? (that second one is actually a pretty low bar, and yet if there is something it is not easily discoverable)
Here is an honest good faith answer to a pretty aggressively hostile question: Adult daycare is almost the opposite of what Recurse center is. Recurse is largely unstructured: people do what inspires them and make their own plans. You will find more structure, hand holding and mandatory time wastes in virtually any business than you will at Recurse Center. A 12 week batch is not a lot of time to carry out a major research project, but it is generally not intended to treat this as a start up incubator. There are other places for that kind of activity. Recurse is a place to freely learn and explore. There are a few companies that have emerged but they are not huge money machines (most companies are not). There is also some interesting research that is done. Some things that pop into my head immediately are: Dan Luu's studies of Motion to Photon Latency in keyboard input [1] Raph Levien's work on Xi [2], and Andrew Kelly's work on Zig [3].
I'm sure there are other people could dig up more examples, but that really isn't the point. A school's purpose is to produce educated people. Recurse is more of an unschool but the aim is to help people learn and think - it should be judged on those terms first and foremost.
[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ [2] https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-raph-levien [3] https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-andrew-kelley
From what I see, this is more of a sabbatical time to just explore and enjoy programming without needing a productive end. I've been considering it myself.
I don't get it. Why would you ask if an adult daycare leads to a business or new discoveries? Daycares are for nurturing curiosity and fostering development in a socially engaging environment—much like the Recurse Center—not for publishing papers.
> Has there been a business started based on work done there?
Greg Brockman went through Recurse in Summer of 2015, and co-founded OpenAI in December of 2015.
Even if for the sake of argument its conceded it's a "daycare", what's wrong with that? No one's being forced to go there. It's free for the participants. There's no harm in a group that facilitates people exploring what interests them in a setting where others are doing the same.
You are missing the point. On the line between explore and exploit, RC is basically 100% explore. The point is to learn, and more importantly, to flex the muscle of learning without being taught. And to participate in a community of kind and curious people who are also motivated to do the same.
> This place sounds like an adult daycare.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
The practical goal of Recurse is to make connections. Starting a business or publishing research are explicitly non-goals.
The paradox of networking events is nobody who attends "networking events" is worth networking with.
It's weird to say that about a YCombinator-affiliated event on a YCombinator forum. I'm not especially fond of YC but there's pretty clearly potential to make valuable connections in this sphere.
Recurse Center is only YC-affiliated in the sense that the founders did YC (S10). It's not YC sponsored or endorsed as far as I could find.
It doesn't really attract the YC kind of people either.
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