I wasn&#x27;t slighting Dijkstra but merely commenting on the era of the time.<p>You can for example see how primitive things were back then by describing &quot;mutable state&quot; as &quot;dynamic&quot; and &quot;immutable&quot; as &quot;static&quot;. Dynamic and static these days have entirely different connotations typically more associated with type systems.<p>Things have moved on and now in 2016 mutable state is increasingly being pushed out of codebases in favour of immutable practices. Recursion is (and always has been) one way of doing that.<p>:)