title: Are there any modern languages not supporting recursion?
body: <p>There is a lot of talk about loop-less (functional) programming languages, but I haven't heard of any modern recursive-less programming languages. I know COBOL doesn't (or didn't) support recursion and I imagine it's the same for FORTRAN (or at the very least they will have a weird behaviour), but are there any modern languages?</p>
  
  <p>There are several reasons I am wondering about this...</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>From what I understand there is no recursive algorithm for which no iterative implementation exists that is at least as performant (as you can simply "simulate" recursion iteratively, when managing the stack within the loop). So there is a) no performance gain and b) no capability gain from using recursion.</li>
  <li>Recursion can have worse performance than iteration for things like naiive, recursive implementations of fibonacci numbers. People like to point out that recursion can be just as fast when compilers are optimized and it comes to tail recursion, but from my understanding tail recursion algos always are trivial to convert to loops. So there is c) potential performance loss from recursion.</li>
  <li>Academics seem to have a thing for recursion, but then again most of them can't/don't really write any productive code. C++ (or object orientation in general) is the living proof how academic ideas can make their way into the business world/companies, while beeing mostly impractical. I wonder if recursion is only another example of this. (I know this is an opinionated topic, but the majority of accomplished software engineers I heard talk agree on this at least to some extent).</li>
  <li>I have written recursive algorithms in productive systems before, but I can't think of a time, when I <em>really</em> benefited from using recursion. Recursive algorithms d) may or may not provide code readability advantages in some cases. I am not sure about this...</li>
  <li>Most (all?) modern operating systems rely on specified call stack conventions. So if you want to call any external library from within your program, your programming language/compiler has to comply with the system's call stack convention. This makes it an easy step to adopt recursion for programming languages/compilers. However if you would create a recursion-less language you wouldn't need a call stack at all, which would have interesting effects in terms of memory management...</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>So I am not hating on recursion... I am just wondering if the recursion-less language experiment has been done in the recent past and what the results have been, as it seems like a practical experiment to me?</p>