Lol that's exactly how I saw it as well. Recursive gets those nesting dolls look in my head, loops are the same size but repeated, even if infinite. Yes even if the code is almost the same since you can write a loop recursively anyways (okay haven't tested but seems like it'd work mostly fine but not always as clean).

I think the beauty of it is that the joke can be amusing in multiple ways. Those are the best jokes to me, cause I can think of different ways the next time I see them.

At one point I developed a habit of converting any recursive algorithm I was writing into a loop instead, since I knew function calls have overhead and all recursion really does is lets you use the calling stack and flow control as an invisible data structure.

Then I got a question about parsing brackets properly during an interview and wrote a loop-based parser to solve it and the guy had to fish for a bit before I remembered recursion and realized that's the answer he was looking for. My mind just wouldn't consider using a whole calling stack when an integer would do the trick faster.

I think you're talking about tail recursion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call (see section on equivalence to while statement)

Not the standard case where the stack grows