this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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People would learn bad habits.
For example, due to parameter passing often being done via the zero page, recursion is unnecessarily hard on the 6502, whereas one could argue that recursion is one of the major skills to master for any programmer.
@irdc @feoh All programmers need to learn recursion and fully understand it so when they encounter it in the wild they can properly analyze what it is doing and replace it with non-recursive code.
A non-recursive recursive descent parser isn’t any easier to reason about.
One could, but I would argue that this idea pre-supposed a very ascetic class of programmer, and that depending on one's goals in learning how to program, recursion can be a useful concept but saying it should be the one litmus test for any learning platforms seems highly questionable to me.