[sansnomme]

A better question to ask is: Is it a success of CS education since developers know when to make tradeoffs in software engineering and go for the most easily understandable code (recursive implementation used in most pseudo code) since deeply recursive cases are rare, or is it a failure that software engineers cannot figure out how to convert a recursive algorithm into an iterative implementation for greater memory efficiency?

[kadoban]

It doesn't necessarily mean anything that deeply nested cases are rare. If you're making a general library, someone is going to throw user input at it, and some users will try to break your system. If it can avoid a crash in that case, it usually should.