I tried to gently inform you that you had misinterpreted what I said. That was your opportunity to pause and think, and realize that I did not say what you thou

I tried to gently inform you that you had misinterpreted what I said. That was your opportunity to pause and think, and realize that I did not say what you thought I said, but you missed it. > The point is, the idea that it's somehow "unprofessional" to write a recursive function is an absurd assertion. ...which is why I didn't say that. What I said was, "[E]ven in Scheme, most times where you would write a recursive function, you should be writing something with one of the higher-order functions. 99.9% of recursive functions contain a buggy hand-rolled implementation of map, reduce, or filter." There are certainly cases where writing a recursive function is cleaner, and I would never say it's "unprofessional" to write a recursive function. However, I've debugged enough Scheme to know that if you're writing a recursive function you're probably reimplementing one of the core higher-order functions, and in doing so you're increasing your chance of bugs. You're also making your code less composable. If you're not experience enough with Scheme to have recognized this fact yet, you're probably not experienced enough to recognize exceptions to the rule. > Many, many functional languages beyond just "academic" ones use recursion as a standard idiom, and using that to dismiss Scheme is itself an inflammatory statement especially on a site that is literally running on top of a Scheme derivative. Scheme is my favored language for personal projects. I write more Python because there's more work available for Python, but when it has been my choice I've chosen Scheme. The reason I've written so much Python in a functional style was because I learned that style from Scheme. So if you think I'm dismissing Scheme, you're hilariously wrong. My statement isn't inflammatory; you became inflamed all on your own. > I realize it is these days considered "un-Pythonic" to consider there to be more than one way to do something, but that is in fact one of the reasons why I no longer use Python. The attitude of its creator and its community have shifted against creative solutions and I have no use for that attitude in a technology field. Cool. I thought I was the one being inflammatory. It seems that you saw me say, "Scheme is a more academic language" and decided to take offense to that. Well, news flash, Scheme was designed at the MIT AI Lab. It's an academic language. That doesn't mean it's a "toy language" or that it's only an academic language; I didn't say either of those things. It's also ridiculous that you needed to bring Erlang into the conversation to defend Scheme: Scheme has plenty of history of professional use at both HP and Sun and is perfectly well respected in its own right. Please try to learn something from this experience.