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> And frankly, lots of programmers don't have a good handle on it, even the ones who studied CS in college, so asking them to maintain recursive code written by someone else usually ends pretty poorly.

Honestly that speaks to the caliber of programmers at play here. Sure, the average bootcamp grad probably can’t use a recursive function, but a real software engineer should have mastered it during any serious intro class. Without recursion I’m not sure how we would even be programming (think of all the parsers and grammars relying on it!).

> So when we consider that, actually, no, it's not true that using an explicit stack takes "a lot more code" (it's like, three extra lines), recursion starts to look more and more like a code smell, a smell indicating the originating programmer is more a temporarily-embarrassed mathematician than an engineer.

It sure is a code smell if the average programmer in a given org can’t understand it.