Iterators are great! I think I prefer thinking in terms of recursion because it helps me break it into subproblems better. That doesn't invalidate anyone's preference for iterators or generators. And you Python devs have nice list comprehensions as well, so I don't doubt that you have no real need for recursion.

But I will say it seems really weird to me to refuse tail-call recursion flat out. People even do it in C as an optimization (http://llvm.org/docs/Passes.html#tailcallelim-tail-call-elim...).