Children implicitly use recursion, for instance:
Road trip to Disney World
Are we there yet?(no)
Are we there yet?(Soon)
Are we there yet?(Almost...)
Are we there yet?(SHHHH)
Are we there yet?(!!!!!)
At which point the child falls asleep...
This countdown function is a simple example:
function countdown()
{
return (arguments[0] > 0 ?
(
console.log(arguments[0]),countdown(arguments[0] - 1)) :
"done"
);
}
countdown(10);
Hofstadter's Law applied to software projects is also relevant.
The essence of human language is, according to Chomsky, the ability of finite brains to produce what he considers to be infinite grammars. By this he means not only that there is no upper limit on what we can say, but that there is no upper limit on the number of sentences our language has, there's no upper limit on the size of any particular sentence. Chomsky has claimed that the fundamental tool that underlies all of this creativity of human language is recursion: the ability for one phrase to reoccur inside another phrase of the same type. If I say "John's brother's house", I have a noun, "house", which occurs in a noun phrase, "brother's house", and that noun phrase occurs in another noun phrase, "John's brother's house". This makes a lot of sense, and it's an interesting property of human language.
References
- Recursion and Human Thought
