I disagree entirely. I understand recursion just fine. I can look at a problem and think "this problem space is correctly represented by a tree/graph" and can

I disagree entirely. I understand recursion just fine. I can look at a problem and think "this problem space is correctly represented by a tree/graph" and can meaningfully translate that into a program that shoves the data into a tree/graph-like data structure, and my natural inclination when computing on a tree/graph-like data structure is to use recursion. On the other hand, I understand that not all problems lend themselves to recursive solutions. I can look at a problem and think "this problem space is correctly represented by a matrix" and the reality is that linear algebra problems are often iterative, not recursive, in nature. It is certainly possible to do the simplex algorithm recursively with immutable data, but it's just so much straightforward to do it iteratively on a mutable matrix. The other thing is that most of my day job is just hooking one API up to another API to achieve my business's desired outcome. I don't need "interesting" algorithmic solutions for 95% of what I do. I just... extract data from one API and plug the data into another. You don't need recursion for that, and the "list of steps to do in order and (possibly) loop over that" paradigm with whichever seasonings you wish to add to it is just fine. (OOP is the flavor of the ~~day~~century at my company) edit: I forgot the bit that ties it all together. I am absolutely no good at functional programming. I've tried to sit down and learn Haskell or Lisp a dozen times and always failed. I've bought books. I'm still no good. It just takes me ten times as much code that's completely unreadable to do something that would be simple and straightforward in C++.