theres no joke here, it's just how you can cruise control to working recursive code, which is often very useful, even if there are probably better ways to do it. If you remember to terminate first, and recurse last, and try really hard to keep that consistent, usually the problem shakes out easy.

it's also pretty much the structure you want if you have a language (or optimizer) that understands tail-chaining: you always want to recurse last, as that's basically what gets transformed into a tail chain/iterative approach anyway.

Wonder if this'll help me transform the SICP "coin counting" problem from recursive to iterative...