Many of the readers here are programmers; a well written article (or blog post, even) about coding in a way which lets your compiler use tail recursion optimiza

Many of the readers here are programmers; a well written article (or blog post, even) about coding in a way which lets your compiler use tail recursion optimizations is Pretty Interesting to many of us, even if we already know in our hearts that recursion can be efficient. The fact that he's doing this in a non-lisp makes it more accessible to some, and just interesting to others. I think that's OK to have on the HN front page, even if it's not something you personally find interesting. Try considering that HN is a resource to more than just you or just me. Consider that some programmers here might be more or less experienced than us, and that it's possible this might be the window into "oh, hey, recursion!" that some new programmer needed in order to discover a new avenue of learning. In that light, this is a pretty worthy article on HN. I especially like that he goes into implementation detail, rather than just saying, "Duh, use tail recursion", and thus ends up explaining how to actually do it well (in case a reader didn't know).