[tsimionescu]

I think you're in a tiny minority if you think it's easier to read and understand algorithms written using recursive tail calls than imperative loops. Even outside of programming, take a look at most work being done in algorithm research - you'll see that most often algorithms are described in an imperative pseudo-code, and using a mix of loops and regular recursion (not tail recursion), with maybe some mapping and filtering constructs in addition.

Tail recursion in particualr is the least human-friendly way to represent looping. It mixes input and output parameters of the function in any but the most trivial cases. It also forces the caller to figure out what is the base value for all of the output parameters (often requiring a separate function just to provide those to callers). And it basically takes an implementation detail and makes it a part of your function interface.

Even in math, you typically define recursive functions like f(x) = 1 + f(x-1), not f(x, y) = f(x-1, y+1); g(x) = f(x, 0).