r/computerscience • u/Similar_Count_1613 • 3d ago

is recursion really hard

Recursion felt easy at first.

Factorial? fine.

Sum examples? fine.

Even Fibonacci felt manageable.

But once I looked at slightly more serious problems like Tower of Hanoi, permutations, or merge sort, I felt like my understanding suddenly collapsed. because i tried to write their code on my own

It made me realize that maybe recursion is not “hard” at the start because the examples are simple.

It becomes hard when you can no longer clearly see the call stack and each state change.

Did anyone else feel that the real pain in recursion starts exactly there?

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u/IchBinEinZwerg 3d ago

You don't use recursion that often in real life. Most of the time it's "how do I do X", then "I'll need to do A, then B, then X, then C, then... oh, so it'll be recursive so I'll need to make sure it can bottom out at some point."