I prefer recursion to loops since loops bundle everything together in one environment; variables left over from previous iterations are still in scope, which is confusing and may cause problems, e.g. using a variable before it's been updated for this iteration, or after it's been updated for the next iteration, etc.

Recursion is just function calls. The only things which are in scope are those required by this iteration, accepted as arguments. The only thing I need to produce is a return value. This is a small, well-defined interface, as opposed to the self-interfering spaghetti code of a loop.

By accepting values as arguments and calling functions with different values, the problem of when and what to assign variables goes away; the language does it automatically by binding arguments.

Also, recursion (like function calls in general) allows thinking in terms of values, which are timeless and explicit in the code, rather than state, which is implicit and varies during execution.

Semi-related: http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2012-10-02-looping_in_javascript....