Stack Machines and Where To Find Them
Ever tried googling "recursion"?

There's something quite peculiar about recursion. Every developer and their dog has heard of it at some point, and most developers seem to have quite a strong opinion about it.
Sometimes, they were taught about it in college. Some old professor with a gray beard and funny words (the hell's a cons cell? why are you asking if I want to have s-expr with you?) made them write Lisp or Caml for a semester, growling at the slightest sign of loops or mutability to the poor student whose only experience with programming yet was Java-like OOP. Months spent writing factorials, linked lists, Fibonacci sequences, depth-first searches, and other algorithms with no real-world use whatsoever.
Other times, it was by misfortune. While writing code in any of their usual C-family enterprise-grade languages, they accidentally made a function call itself, and got greeted by a cryptic error message about something flowing over a stack. They looked it up on Google (or Yahoo? AltaVista? comp.lang.java?) and quickly learned that they had just stumbled upon some sort of arcane magic that, in addition to being a simply inefficient way of doing things was way too complicated for any