[samdk]

I think it's unfortunate the first/often only exposure people get to FP is a build-up-from-the-foundations approach that emphasizes recursion so much, I think it leaves most students with a poor understanding of why functional paradigms and practices are practical and useful.

I've written primarily in a functional language (OCaml) for a long time now, and it's very rare I write a recursive function. Definitely less than once a month.

In most domains, almost every high-level programming task involves operating on a collection. In the same way that you generally don't do that with a while loop in an imperative language, you generally don't do it with recursion in a functional one, because it's an overly-powerful and overly-clunky tool for the problem.

For me the real key to starting to be comfortable and productive working in a functional language was realizing that they do actually all have for-each loops all over the place: the "fold" function.

(Although actually it turns out you don't end up writing "fold"s all that often either, because most functional languages have lots of helper functions for common cases--map, filter, partition, etc. If you're solving a simpler problem, the simpler tool is more concise and easier to think about.)

[chalst]

Agreed. Point-free code is a better hallmark of good FP than recursion.