I've recently learned about tail-recursions as a way to make a recursion that doesn't crash when you give it too big of a number to work with. I realised that I could easily rewrite a tail-recursion as a while loop and have it do basically exactly the same thing, which lead me wondering - is there any use for recursions when you can do everything with a normal loop?
Yes, recursion code looks smaller and is easier to understand, but it also has a chance of completely crashing, while a simple loop cannot crash doing the same task.
It's been a long while since I posted this question and my opinion on the topic has changed. Here's why:
I learned Haskell, and it's a language that fixes everything bad about recursion - recursive definitions and algorithms are turned into normal looping algorithms and most of the time you don't even use recursion directly and instead use map, fold, filter, or a combination of those. And with everything bad removed, the good sides of functional programming start to shine through - everything is closer to its mathematical definition, not obscured by clunky loops and variables.
To someone else who is struggling to understand why recursion is great, go learn Haskell. It has a lot of other very interesting features like being lazy (values are evaluated only when they're requested), static (variables can never be modified), pure (functions cannot do anything other than take input and return output, so no printing to the console), strongly typed with a very expressive type system, filled with mind-blowing abstractions like Functor, Monad, State, and much more. I can almost say it's life-changing.