This reminds of an old idea of a friend of mine, who said that pure, unrestricted recursion (this applies to iteration as well) is like goto: a primitive too powerful and not abstract enough that should not be directly exposed to the programmer in a high level language. This post shows that there's an additional reason for avoiding explicit recursion when possible: performance. Sure, you can define any function by using recursion, but the compiler won't be smart enough to parallelize it.

Does anyone know if a language with only high order functions like map, reduce and others could be Turing complete? Probably 80-90% of cases would fit in the schema of some predefined functions like scanl. My intuition is that for some cases you would still need explicit recursion or iteration, for instance if you wanted to loop forever or until a certain condition is met, but perhaps these cases could be modelled with some special high order functions as well, or with explicit infinite recursion as in Rust's 'loop'.