What I did at Recurse Center

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!

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.

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.