I have used Clojure on several customer projects and my own Cookingspace.com hobby project. I like Clojure except for the way recursion is handled. I have been using various Lisps since 1982 and Clojure’s support for recursion bugs me.
IANA clojurian, but its inelegance of tail recursion is a limitation of java, correct?
Yeah, because the JVM can't do TCO you can't have nice recursion. The options in the language provides are good enough but definitely not the most ergonomic.
I can't remember the last time I wrote a recursive call in Clojure, other than for multi-arity. In general, if I were in a code review and saw the "recur" keyword, I think I would regard it as a code smell and see if I can re-implement it using higher order functions.