And even when recursion does show up, the return value tends to "read" better. Like "the sum is the head of the list plus the sum of the tail." Whereas with an

And even when recursion does show up, the return value tends to "read" better. Like "the sum is the head of the list plus the sum of the tail." Whereas with an imperative loop, I have to either recognize an idiom or manually execute the loop in my brain's VM.