PHP Developer Makes Case for Recursion With Real-World UI Builder Example

A DEV Community article published in 2025 responds to a viral X post by developer Nick Cosentino, who claimed that in over 20 years of programming he had never found recursion useful. The author argues that recursion can be simpler and more readable than iterative approaches in the right context. Using the PHP UI Builder library as a practical example, the article demonstrates how a hierarchical, tree-structured component system is naturally suited to recursive algorithms. The library supports virtual components — such as When, Each, Pick, and List — that can generate other components, including further virtual ones, making recursion an elegant fit. The piece concludes that recursion holds clear advantages when a function's logic can be expressed as a simple self-referencing definition, particularly with tree-structured data.