Can every recursion be converted into iteration?

Question

A reddit thread brought up an apparently interesting question:

Tail recursive functions can trivially be converted into iterative functions. Other one

Answer 1

Sometimes replacing recursion is much easier than that. Recursion used to be the fashionable thing taught in CS in the 1990's, and so a lot of average developers from that time figured if you solved something with recursion, it was a better solution. So they would use recursion instead of looping backwards to reverse order, or silly things like that. So sometimes removing recursion is a simple "duh, that was obvious" type of exercise.

This is less of a problem now, as the fashion has shifted towards other technologies.