My Plans for Recurse

Next week I’ll be doing a mini-batch at Recurse. I’m planning to blog about it each day, and I figured I’d start by laying out my plans for the week.

My goal is to learn more about Lisp and in particular, its macro system. I’ve been trying to understand metaprogramming better and I see recommendations to “check out Lisp and its macro system” a lot. I’ve already got some suggestions of lispy things to read from Recursers, which I’m hoping to look through this weekend so I can get a running start.

The toy project, which will hopefully be a good vehicle for learning, will be a madlibs program. The first iteration will be “normal” madlibs - that is you, you feed it story templates and then users can generate a silly version by putting in random verbs, nouns, etc. This will give me a chance to get used to lisp’s syntax and how you actual construct a program in it. The second iteration will be code madlibs, where you feed it code templates and users can provide random variables, operators, or maybe even classes or functions. The newly generated program will be executed and, ideally, the process and result will be documented and returned to the user. I’ve taken to calling the second iteration codelibs in my head.

This is an ambitious project which I probably won’t finish by the end of the week. I’m hoping to take advantage of the many collaborative opportunities Recurse offers to pair, have discussions, etc, and I’ll be prioritizing those. Regardless, I’m looking forward to it.