I know that's the origin of why Clojure does its manual loop/recur thing, but I've grown to kind of prefer its explicitness. There's no ambiguity on whether it will TCO; it simply won't compile if it's not tail-call.

I don't agree that being able to turn off TCO in debugging is enough to call Guido's characterization "ridiculous". I often have to debug running production systems, and those are (hopefully) not deployed with debug compilations.

You're not wrong about loops not creating a stack trace; I guess what bothers me (and maybe Guido) is that with loops there's no expectation of a stack trace, while with a function call there is.