[jowiar]

Readability is a very important contributor to reliability -- minimizing WTFs is important.

That said, writing code that fits the construction of the language is probably more useful than siding between "loops or recursion". If I'm writing Scala, my code is usually chock-full-of-recursion. If I'm writing C, not really as much, because I'm thinking "which bits go into which memory". With Python I tend to think in terms of list comprehensions, etc.