According to Daylight's book The Dawn of Software Engineering: From Turing to Dijkstra, Dijkstra actually advocated adding recursion to Algol 60 despite not hav

According to Daylight's book The Dawn of Software Engineering: From Turing to Dijkstra, Dijkstra actually advocated adding recursion to Algol 60 despite not having good reasons to use it himself. He felt that it made the language more general, while his detractors at the time felt that anything unnecessary (especially anything potentially having a negative performance impact) amounted to waste. Dijkstra was a vocal opponent of putting machine-specific stuff in the language. History seems to have borne out both. I think it's a bit of a dilution of his message to say he was a champion of comprehensibility. He was more interested in correctness, and his dream was that formal methods would be foundational to software development. That clearly didn't happen.