Programming

I generally find that writing code that requires a lot of “accounting” is very prone to mistakes that are easier to avoid with recursion. What I mean by this is stuff where you’re tracking multiple counters and sets on each iteration. It’s very easy to produce off by one errors in these types of algos.

Recursion, once you get the hang of it, can make certain kinds of problems “trivial,” and with tail-call recursion being implemented in many languages, the related memory costs have also been somewhat mitigated.

Loops are simpler for beginners to understand, but I don’t think recursion is all that hard to learn with a bit of practice, and can really clean up some otherwise very complicated code.

My general opinion is that we are all beginners for a short part of our journey, but our aim shouldn’t be to make everything simple enough that beginners never need to advance their skills. We spend most of our careers as journeymen, and that’s the level of understanding we should be aiming for/expecting for most code. Recursion in that context is absolutely ok from a “readability/complexity” perspective.