We were mainly torn between choosing a name that was completely meaningless and one that was mostly meaningless, but which had some connotations to programming. We opted to do the latter. All the meaningful, descriptive names we could come up with -- like "Programming Retreat" -- are too generic and/or have the same problems as "Hacker School." (We also wanted to make sure we could get the .com, and we wanted to avoid making up completely new words.)

That is to say: We expect that for almost everyone hearing it for the first time, "the Recurse Center" will be meaningless. That sounds like a bad place to be in, however, it's a much better than where we were before. Almost everyone who heard "Hacker School" for the first time had to be convinced that one or both of the words didn't mean what they thought it did in this context.

Today is day 0. Our job now is to take these largely empty words (Recurse Center) and imbue them with our values and purpose.

Glad to hear you like who we are/what we do, regardless :)