[Jtsummers]

Recursion is great, IMHO, as a non-professor type. It allows for much clearer expressions of intent for my methods and functions than the iterative version often achieves.

There are some recursive structures that are just much more natural than their iterative counterparts. Parsing (as lysium suggests in the sibling post), for example.

But also things like graph and tree traversals, and many search algorithms related to those same structures. If you attempt a tree traversal iteratively, you have to maintain the return stack manually, rather than permitting the language to do it for you (assuming a full traversal and not a search, a search could be done iteratively without much trouble).

[13415]

I'd say the opposite. Mutually recursive functions are notoriously hard to get right and debug, and many languages have stack limits. Often it's better to maintain the stack manually.

[Jtsummers]

That has not been my experience, but I know many people who agree with you. IME, the difference has been that I came into CS with a more mathematical (formal) approach to programming, and they tended to come at it with a more mechanistic approach (especially when I hear it from non-CS developers, often EEs).