I took a History of CS course in college, where this controversy was discussed. The way I understood it, the two camps approached the question of what ALGOL sho

I took a History of CS course in college, where this controversy was discussed. The way I understood it, the two camps approached the question of what ALGOL should be slightly differently. One camp (against recursion) was trying to design a language that would be productive for programming in the (then) here and now, with the machines they had at the time; in other words, the language is molded after the machine. Since efficiently implementing recursion wasn't well understood at the time, adding it to the language was a no-go for them. The Dijkstra side of the argument was that the language should be designed to be as elegant as possible, without much concern for the limitations of the machines of the day. The idea was that, once a broadly accepted programming language was designed, computer designs would follow to support it. I think both are valid viewpoints (especially in context), although with perfect hindsight Dijkstra et al seem to have been the more prescient side.