Python, TCO, paradigms, and online classes

I was working on some code for udacity's class and I have been bitten by something interesting, python's lack of TCO.

I know you can do the "same" things without it, but it was pretty
interesting to realize that I am nowadays so used to work with
functional languages that recursion is one of my first tools to
express loops.

Expressing things in imperative ways is taking me more time now, and I
begin to see how different paradigms really leave an impression on
you. Strange and interesting...