You submitted this application on July 13, 2018, to the Fall 1, 2018 batch. You can see the status of your application here.

Code CracklePop
for (var i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
  if (i % 15 === 0) {
    console.log("CracklePop")
  } else if (i % 5 === 0) {
    console.log("Pop")
  } else if (i % 3 === 0) {
    console.log("Crackle")
  } else {
    console.log(i)
  }
}
Please link to a program you've written from scratch.
http://woofjs.com/create.html#2048

What is the most fascinating thing you've learned in the past month?
I learned some fascinating things about voting system in "How to Not Be Wrong". While first-pass-the-post voting is obviously worse than more modern schemes, such as instant-runoff voting, it's not entirely clear what the optimal voting scheme is. In fact, it may be impossible to construct a voting system that doesn't violate our intuitions in certain cases.

Our intuition about voting is that if in a head-to-head race, candidate A would be preferred to candidate B, then candidate B should definitely not be the candidate. However, what if there is a third candidate, C, who would beat A in a head-to-head race, but would lose to B? In this case, it's unclear who to put in office.

What do you want to be doing in two years?
I'm currently doing independent programming language research, and I'd love to be able to continue that for the foreseeable future. Maybe by then I'll have a real programming language to maintain!

Why do you want to attend the Recurse Center?
I've wanted to attend the Recurse Center for years, but haven't found the right time. In recent months, I attended a few Recurse Center events and was shocked by how much I learned from the Recursers there. I was really drawn to the idea of surrounding myself with people like that.

What would you like to work on at the Recurse Center?
I'm currently working on investing a code comprehensibility, how long it takes a developer to learn an unfamiliar codebase. (In that way, my work is in the spirit of Glen's http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/, which he did at the Recurse Center.) More specifically, I am researching ways to make comprehensibility more modular, so that one's understanding grows proportionally with the amount of code read - as opposed to how now you have to read much of a system to even understand a small part of it. I believe the functional reactive programming paradigm lends itself well to comprehensible modularity, because of it's focus on explicit dependencies. A draft of my work in progress in this space can be found here: http://futureofcoding.org/drafts/frp. At the Recurse Center, I'd like to work on this line of inquiry.

Describe your programming background in a few sentences.
I started learning to code in middle school with LOGO. I fell in love with it, moving on to Scheme, Java, Haskell and Python in high school and college. In particular, I enjoy functional programming, recently with Elm. I currently mostly program in JavaScript, sometimes with VueJS. I founded an after-school CS program, where I created woofjs, a JavaScript framework, for my students. Now I'm doing independent programming language research in Functional Reactive Programming.

Have you worked professionally as a programmer?
I worked as a software engineer at First Round Capital doing analytics. Then I worked at Looker (looker.com) doing software engineering, mostly concerned with scaling, security and APIs. I'm currently doing part-time programming languages research for Dark, co-founded by Paul Bigger, founder of CircleCi.

Do you have a Computer Science degree or are you seeking one?
I got 3 semesters into my CS degree at Penn. I took most of the CS classes they had before I left. I don't indeed to go back.

How did you hear about RC?
I've been following you guys for years. I've read every word on your website multiple times. I'm a real fanboy!

Links
github.com/stevekrouse 
linkedin.com/in/stevekrouse 
stevekrouse.com 
futureofcoding.org