Are you serious? How would you iterate over a set of rules and a big data volume, without using recursion?

A loop? Can you please explain?

'Explain'?

I assume the "explain" refers to the most important thing you can learn about recursive programming: that it is often but not always the least efficient strategy when compared with looping.

So the claim that recursive programming is the only or primary method of iterating over large data sets requires some explanation...

I haven't read the article but i'm guessing this a reference to divide and conquer methods. Such as map reduce used in hadoop and such.