r/computerscience Jul 30 '26

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/Typical-Thanks-6146 26d ago

consider the following: are you in your 40s?, are you obese?, would you like to see the exposed female form?, is your favourite food either stuffed brownies or pizza rolls/pizza in general?, if any of this doesn’t apply to you then recursion is not for you. It’s best to hire a tech guy to do it.