It is difficult now to believe that such views were ever common. The change in attitude since 1970 has been complete. If anyone tried today to promulgate a general-purpose programming language that did not support recursion, they would be laughed at. A programmer who doesn't understand recursion is a pitiful anachronism. It is important to notice that some the beliefs above are correct .
Recursion is inefficient.
Recursion is unnecessary because its ends can always be accomplished with iterative techniques. But these criticisms miss the point, which is that recursion is nevertheless an important and powerful programming technique that can make many programs simpler. Many problems naturally have recursive structure, and recursive programs to solve them are more straightforward and direct than the equivalent iterative programs. There was a vicious cycle in the acceptance of recursion. Popular languages of the 1960's, Fortran and Cobol, did not support recursion.