Oh, certainly. My assumption was that the GP meant that functors aren't useful on their own _in general_, rather than in the particular context of someone just getting into the typed functional paradigm. And, of course, recursion does work just fine in other languages, but (and I'm saying this more for posterity than as a retort since I assume you're well aware of this point) recursion schemes offer a layer of abstraction over direct recursion that eliminates the need to manually implement various recursive operations for each of the data structures you have at hand. As with a lot of the higher-level constructs in languages like Haskell, that level of abstraction may not have any practical benefits in most domains, but it's nice to have when it does offer a benefit in a particular domain.