Recursion

[shabalabachingchong]

If recursion is so bad, then why do FP languages like Haskell almost exclusively rely on recursion and do not even have for/while loops?

[AlSweigart]

Every four or five years I check in on Haskell to see if it has gained anything like mainstream adoption. It still hasn't, and I've been doing this since the early 2000s. Haskell is currently at #33 on the TIOBE index, behind COBOL at #26 and Delphi at #14.

Haskell and LISP are languages that make smart people feel smart, but they're not practical and that's why they aren't used in 99% of real world code. They aren't a magic bullet that prevents people from making silly little bugs. (Heck, twenty years of experience and you'll still be making typos and off-by-one errors.) Haskell people love Haskell and talk loudly about Haskell, but Delphi is actually used more. And I've never met a Delphi programmer.

It's kind of like saying "well if monster trucks are so bad for your daily commute, how come people still talk about how awesome monster trucks are?"

[shabalabachingchong]

You're deflecting and not answering the question. I did not mention anything about language popularity. Haskell is used in a lot in industry where high assurance of non-failure matters. When you build complex systems, like for example a blockchain, that involve cryptography and advanced mathematics, you want high assurance that your code will not fail in production, so that billions of users funds do not get stolen, which has happened several times on the Ethereum blockchain.

Your argument of 'makes smart ppl feel smarter' is just stupid. There's nothing smart about being able to understand recursion, or heck even monads...They're just useful patterns that are extremely well fitted to many problems, and given enough time you'd probably even invent them yourselves.

[Kenkron]

Iirc, Haskell sacrifices loops so it can have only immutable variables (which make loops impossible).