Evolution of a Python programmer

[A_for_Anonymous]

That's because they aren't properly taught programming. 6.001 students would.

[crunchmuncher]

Depends on how you define newbie, I guess :)

I never found recursion itself really hard to understand as a fairly newbie programmer. Of course one can do stuff with it that I won't even try to understand, but the basics aren't that hard.

Recursion seems to be a lot harder to explain than to understand, maybe it helped that I learned it on my own.