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> The idea that TCO is needed to "fully" leverage anything is silly.

Functional programming relies completely on recursive functions. You just can't do "full" FP without tail call optimizations.

Now, I do side with the other poster up there that is talking about jumps. You don't even need jumps actually, you can use inlining and loops too, but they do make the compiler's life easier.

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I think that Clojure's success is proof positive that explicit tail recursion and lazy sequences is sufficient to do meaningful FP in the absence of proper tail calls. However, even if you insist that it is somehow not "full", who cares? Clojure is about practicality, not appeasing some platonic ideals. And I say this as some one who would very much appreciate having proper tail calls.

Of course, having lazy sequences and functions for manipulating them is better than not having them.

Yet that's such a small part of what FP has to offer that it isn't funny.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Extremist views are not particularly useful in engineering, despite their utility is science.

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