> but telling them that it's a familiar idea that they already implicitly understand isn't a good idea either. But people do implicitly understand recursion. Y

> but telling them that it's a familiar idea that they already implicitly understand isn't a good idea either. But people do implicitly understand recursion. Your ancestors are your parents and their ancestors. Your descendants are your children and their descendants. Most people understand the previous two sentences. > As soon as they figure out that for and while loops are sufficient to express all the programming ideas they can come up with There are plenty of problems for which recursion is the most natural solution. For example, building HTML for nested comments is easy with recursion and damned difficult without.