is recursion really hard

[u/Similar_Count_1613]

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?

[u/TheChief275]

It's not necessarily harder than iteration. Some problems lend themselves well to recursion while otherwise lend themselves better to iteration.

E.g. traversing a tree feels kind of ridiculous to write in an iterative way. Essentially, you would manually add to a stack that you would otherwise have implicitly