Recursion is (in many, but not all) languages slightly slower, and it does have some dangers (smashing the stack), but used properly it's a completely legitimate, valuable tool for production code.

I have seen recursion code implode on itself on the JVM before. In this case, we caught the annoying stack overflow problem before it went into production and I had to work a good number of hours ...

Java factorial recursion explained Notice how the recursive Java factorial function does not need an iterative loop. Instead, the code repeatedly calls itself until a stop condition is met. In this ...