From the site: "The Recurse Center is a free, self-directed, educational retreat for people who want to get better at programming, whether they’ve been coding for three decades or three months. ... The lower bound for experience for people who have successfully done a batch at the Recurse Center seems to be about two months. " So, OK, it's not a "boot camp". It's more like Advanced Infantry Training. You go there and…
You aren't fond of the name, but you try it on for size anyway. You wince as you feel the name tighten around your body. The name is (re)cursed!
And the verb recurse is used in the name as an adjective when we already have a perfectly good adjectival form of the word— recursive —that is also more immediately familiar. People who consider recurse an ugly back-formation (preferring to recur ) will wince, cringe, and decry the gramatical turpitude all at once. But enough criticism—here's an attempt at something constructive: How about "Recursity"? The .com addre…
"Recur" means something different, regardless of the origins of the word "recursion." By the logic that we should never have two words with the same etymology, we should merge "chief" and "chef" (or "recourse" and "recursion," for that matter). And I don't know why it's an adjective; if it were the "Bill J. Simpson" Center we wouldn't decide "Bill J. Simpson" were an adjective.
This saddens me because it seemed like a good opportunity for the mainstream media to reacquire the good definition of "hacker". I had started to see newspaper articles that used the good meaning.
Cultural inertia on terminology can change, and in the hacker case, I think it should. We certainly rarely say "negro" nowadays in the US except in historical contexts. I'm saddened that Hacker School gave up on the language.
You aren't fond of the name, but you try it on for size anyway. You wince as you feel the name tighten around your body. The name is (re)cursed!
And the verb recurse is used in the name as an adjective when we already have a perfectly good adjectival form of the word— recursive —that is also more immediately familiar. People who consider recurse an ugly back-formation (preferring to recur ) will wince, cringe, and decry the gramatical turpitude all at once. But enough criticism—here's an attempt at something constructive: How about "Recursity"? The .com addre…
From the site: "The Recurse Center is a free, self-directed, educational retreat for people who want to get better at programming, whether they’ve been coding for three decades or three months. ... The lower bound for experience for people who have successfully done a batch at the Recurse Center seems to be about two months. " So, OK, it's not a "boot camp". It's more like Advanced Infantry Training. You go there and…
Does our about page (https://www.recurse.com/about) make it more clear? If so, which info do you wish we had on our home page (beyond that we're in NY)?
I love Hacker School (the entity, not the name) but Recurse Center is a strange choice. "Recurse" does not bring to mind the word "recursion" by itself, and while "School" is a meaningful word, "Center" isn't. It has no umph as a phrase. The reason for the change is completely sound, but the new name is just a little strange to me.
I agree. Unlike "recursion" or "recursive", "recurse" has zero oomph.
"We were able to get recurse.com, which is short, pronounceable, and easy to spell." And so many businesses end up with names because of this. I feel them on this. Everyone sitting around, throwing out their ideas for names, someone at their laptop checking domain registrations at the same time till something sticks.
Are they not eligible for a .edu? That would open up many more possibilities.
I noticed the testimonials on the front page [0] have all be modified to say "Recurse Center" even though some are years old. A quick Internet Archive check [1] confirms they originally read "Hacker School". I'm not sure if this is completely ethical; granted, it's just a name change, but they are presented as being direct quotes, while clearly they no longer are.
"We were able to get recurse.com, which is short, pronounceable, and easy to spell." And so many businesses end up with names because of this. I feel them on this. Everyone sitting around, throwing out their ideas for names, someone at their laptop checking domain registrations at the same time till something sticks.
Are they not eligible for a .edu? That would open up many more possibilities.
.edu is reserved for postsecondary institutions that are institutionally accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies.
I noticed the testimonials on the front page [0] have all be modified to say "Recurse Center" even though some are years old. A quick Internet Archive check [1] confirms they originally read "Hacker School". I'm not sure if this is completely ethical; granted, it's just a name change, but they are presented as being direct quotes, while clearly they no longer are. 0: https://www.recurse.com/#testimonials 1: https://w…
I asked every one of the people who wrote those if they were comfortable with my updating the name in their testimonials prior to changing them.