Programming

It depends on if the problem is recursive or iterative, and how much it needs to be optimized.

For example, you may use a for loop for a simple find and replace scheme for characters in a string, where you check each character one by one until you find one which matches the target, and then substitute that.

There are certainly recursive ways to do string replacement in strings which might be faster than an iterative search depending on implementation, but that's more optimization than I might need 99.9999% of the time

A recursive problem that's difficult to solve iteratively is browsing all the files in a folder and it's subfolders. Each folder may have several subfolders, which you then need to search, but then each of those folders can have subfolders. This problem can be solved fairly easily recursively but not as easily iteratively.

That's not to say it can't be solved that way, but the implementation may be easier to write

Recursive code, however, is more frequently prone to bugs which causes infinite recursion leading to crashes, as it is not a tool which is often used and requires several more fences to prevent issues. For example, in the folder example, if one were to encounter a shortcut to another folder and implement code to follow that shortcut as if it were a directory as well, then placing a shortcut to a folder within itself might cause the code to recurse infinitely without having a maximum recursion depth and or checking for previously seen folders.