[w4rh4wk5]

IMHO: no.

The concept of a loop (i.e. doing something over and over as long as a condition is true) is (again IMHO) a much simpler concept than recursion.

The university I worked at tried moving functional programming into the first semester. Let's just say, that didn't work out at all. The imperative programming style is apparently much easier for students to grasp.

Edit: The more I think about it, it seems to me that a loop is clearer because the initial state, upon which you iterate on, is much more obvious. Where with recursion, I primarily see the step, but not where exactly I started from -- if that makes any sense..