I typically think of “evil” as relegated to the realm of literature and film, or the pretend games we played in grammar school. But, months after writing this article spelling out the fundamentals of recursion and how to apply it in PHP, the debate has been raging recently as to whether or not recursion itself is “evil”. I guess I just have to remember this stuff really helps some people, and there will always be coders with strong opinions. Like the PHP manual itself, sometimes the reader comments on an article can be illuminating. In this case, they are at least highly entertaining.