Recursion is Natural

The main reason I am surprised that so many developers distrust recursion is that recursion is a feature of human language. We all use it every day when we talk to one another. English utilizes recursion in a number of situations. One of the rules (from the field within Linguistics called Transformational Grammar, which I studied in college) of the English language is that one sentence can be embedded into another sentence. I won't dive into the sentence diagrams to prove it, but I'll give you an example in the form of a children's rhyme from long ago:

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

As you can see, kids can keep going for as long as they can think of things to add (or until their parents yell at them to stop). English supports recursion in other situations as well. For instance, another rule in English is that we can stack up prepositional phrases as deep as we like, thus: