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.

Haskell exercises and exam solutions for the "Principles of Programming" course. Includes weekly assignments, practice problems, and examples covering functional programming concepts such as recursion ...

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 ...