Pointless recursion.

countTo10.py

def countTo10_recursively(count = 0):
    if(count <= 10):
        countTo10_recursively(count + 1)
        
# which is the same as
def countTo10_theObviousWay():
    for count in xrange(10):
        pass

# lets do some tests        
if __name__ == "__main__":
    from timeit import timeit
        
    t1 = timeit("countTo10_recursively()", \
                 setup="from __main__ import countTo10_recursively", \
                 number=10000)
    t2 = timeit("countTo10_theObviousWay()", \
                 setup="from __main__ import countTo10_theObviousWay", \
                 number=10000)

    print t1, t2

On my computer the for loop is 4 times faster than the recursive approach.

The results get worse for the recursive approach as you increase the number it's counting to. It looks like the stack has a limit of 1000, and I think the slow down is due to the overhead of maintaining the stack for each recursive call.