I think recursive solutions are often very nice indeed. But at worst, recursive solutions are sometimes worse than structured loops, because you can use recursi

I think recursive solutions are often very nice indeed. But at worst, recursive solutions are sometimes worse than structured loops, because you can use recursions very much like a free-style goto, allowing your code to have even less restrictive structure than loops. That's why directly recursive code is usually discouraged and reusing recursive combinators is encouraged. I agree that purity is often used as a buzzword. To parody this, Conal Elliott wrote the "C is purely functional" blog post: http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio... To resolve this, a nice suggestion is to use the term "denotative programming". That is, programming where types and values have mathematically simple denotations that predictably compose exactly according to the syntactic composition being used.