@gregorni It can be pretty hard to understand recursion thinking about the same function calling itself or recreating the call stack in your head, the way I think about it is "am I covering all the cases?" that being does it work for the base case and for the n + 1 case.
Some example in python
def fact(n):
if n == 0: # base case
return 1
return n * fact (n - 1) # n + 1 case
It's important to note that the n + 1 case converges to the base case with each call to fact()
@fkinoshita I'm also kind of confused, because I don't really know what area of coding OCaml is targetting. Their website says it's memory-safe, fast, and industry-leading, but nowhere does it say what usecase it's intended for.
@gregorni@fkinoshita Honestly I feel like ocaml is mainly used by French students because it is in the official program of a popular course. It is quite good for theoretical computer science actually, I've heard it's also used a bit in research works
@apinsard@fkinoshita Yeah, that's what I thought. OCaml seems like a very theoretical language, good for studying CS and programming concepts, but less widely used.
@gregorni@lulu_powerful My take would probably be more nuanced than what you started with, but I’m curious about how you get from you finding it difficult to outright calling it an anti pattern. Can you elaborate?
@localstatic@lulu_powerful Of course, I was exaggerating in a moment of annoyed frustration when I didn't manage to solve a proble with recursion. I actually find it easy to follow in some cases (for instance, I'm reading a book about writing a compiler, and there, it's clear as day.) But I do think in most scenarios (like iterating over a list), simple loops (or a map function, which is recursive) are easier to follow.
Add comment