Wouldn't his goals just fix the symptoms? If a programmer can't run the program in head, he most likely will program by putting strings of commands together in various combinations following his intuition or vague memory about similar code seen before, but basically it will be voodoo programming. Even by having compiler that runs it for you and tells you it's wrong, you can't get far by guessing all the time.
This is rediculius. If you can not comprehend recursion you are indeed a bad programmer, and no amount of tools is going to change that.