[theandrewbailey]

> So far as reasonably possible, I consider its only real purpose to confuse students in 101 courses.

I had a "high school" level programming class with Python before studying CS. I ran into CPython's recursion limit often and wondered why one would use recursion when for loops were a more reliable solution.

Nowadays, my "recursion" is for-looping over an object's children and calling some function on each child object.