Having written Haskell for a few years, the concepts are kind of interchangeable in my mind. I think of recursion as being basically a loop, and a loop as basic

Having written Haskell for a few years, the concepts are kind of interchangeable in my mind. I think of recursion as being basically a loop, and a loop as basically the same thing as recursion. To the point where it seems natural to me to name a recursive helper function `loop`. Obviously they're not exactly the same, but with familiarity they can be translated trivially. I think it's really just a matter of prolonged exposure to make recursion seem intuitive.