In practice recursion is not something that you use that often I think. I've always seen it as a low level construct. The filter/map/reduce idiom or, alternativ

In practice recursion is not something that you use that often I think. I've always seen it as a low level construct. The filter/map/reduce idiom or, alternatively, list comprehensions get you a long way. Not to say recursion is not important. Without it lambda calculus is not Turing complete. But Clojure does provide explicit TCO. Saying this is a big difference is excessive IMHO.