Recursion was a concept that took me a long time to understand. It wasn’t until years after I’d started programming that I felt I really understood it, and it wasn’t until years after that that I felt confident reaching for it as a tool. Like almost everyone, the first way that I learned to think of iteration was with loops. If you wanted to add something together, for example, you would create a “bookkeeping” variable and modify it inside the loop.
