Is recursion difficult? I remember when we did our first recursion in the first year of CS and our professor told us it sould be hard. Then she went on a rant about divide and conquer which made little sense and eventually got to the bit about calling yourself until a criteria.
I think most of us thought it was the easiest part of that year.
I think recursion as an implementation is easy; recursion as a concept is hard to understand if you are just starting to learn. I think part of it is getting your mind to accept the notion that a thing can know of itself before itself has been fully defined.
I think most of us thought it was the easiest part of that year.