CAPTCHAs are indisputably a nuisance. They have to be used, however, where necessary—some sites are simply too spam-prone to avoid needing to use CAPTCHAs (usually in conjunction with one or all of the other suggested methods on the blog.)
For those sites, reCAPTCHA is usually a good enough spam deterrent that has a fairly high human success percentage.
I had several flip outs because of these captcha things. As it says in article, some of them are simply impossible to read. I'm definitely not putting any of those on my website, there are plenty of other solutions out there.