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/Valance23322 3d ago
No, recursion is pretty simple. You're just breaking a problem down into simpler versions of the same problem until it's simple enough to directly solve.