• Cethin@lemmy.zip
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    10 hours ago

    Recursion is amazing for a small selection of problems. Most of the time you don’t need, or want, it. When it is useful though, it tends to be really useful.

    I don’t understand people’s issue with it. I always found it easy. Maybe that’s why I feel this way. Maybe if you find it challenging you want to avoid it, even when it’s a good solution.

    • kamstrup@programming.dev
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      6 hours ago

      Most devs I know like recursion. Trouble is that many popular languages don’t support tail recursion, but throw a stackoverflow error after a few thousand levels. So you have to keep track of max recursion depth manually, and it starts to look like a complicated solution

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      8 hours ago

      I think, their point (and also my experience) is that you get taught about it in university a lot more than about simple loops, so it feels more important even though you rarely use it in reality.

      Same thing goes for linked lists and inheritance…

    • kamstrup@programming.dev
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      6 hours ago

      Most devs I know like recursion. Trouble is that many popular languages don’t support tail recursion, but throw a stackoverflow error after a few thousand levels. So you have to keep track of max recursion depth manually, and it starts to look like a complicated solution