>"The harder part about lisp is actually recursion. Surprisingly, there aren't a lot of programmers who can follow recursion naturally."

All examples of recursion I've ever seen in Lisp follow a similar structure...

* First section checks if recursion is finished. If so, return final result (or final element of full result if returning a list).

* Second section performs an action or two on the inputs.

* Third section calls the function again with revised inputs.

In many ways it's just a do while loop with different syntax.

Not true; loops exist (as a macro) because recursive functions(that naturally correspond to loops and iterations) are harder to read because they hide the logic of termination conditions. Fortunately we are using a powerful language, that lets us transform natural loop syntax to a recursive function.

In my experience you rarely need recursion in Clojure, to the point that it's unidiomatic to use it. For 95% of your looping needs you use combinators, and for the rest there are the loop macros.

I would say nearly all my loops are either map or reduce. That's it.