Dangers of Recursion

Recursion is great because it's simple and elegant (simple != easy). It's often the most straightforward way to solve a problem. But there are some dangers to be aware of:

1. Stack overflow: Each function call requires a bit of memory. So, if you recurse too deeply, you can run out of "stack" memory, which will crash your program. (This is what the famous website is named after.)
2. If you don't have a solid base case, you can end up in an infinite loop (which will likely lead to a stack overflow).
3. Especially in a language like Python, recursion is often slower than a for loop because each function call requires some memory. Tail call optimization can help with this, but Python doesn't support it.