The concern about stack space is slightly misleading since many languages, i.e. Scheme, can easily optimize such functions to use O(1) space by reusing stack fr

The concern about stack space is slightly misleading since many languages, i.e. Scheme, can easily optimize such functions to use O(1) space by reusing stack frames across recursive calls. The problem is that while Scheme guarantees this tail-call optimization in the spec the are many other languages that leave it up to implementation, or intentionally omit it because they don't want to lose stack traces. Anyway I agree with the overall sentiment, and will check out the talk you linked. There's another good one along similar lines: "The Clean Architecture in Python" by Brandon Rhodes: http://pyvideo.org/pyohio-2014/the-clean-architecture-in-python.html http://pyvideo.org/pyohio-2014/the-clean-architecture-in-pyt...