My original point was referencing the use of smart pointers. They are indeed very smart, but can be used stupidly as a bandaid kind of like .clone(). The diffe

My original point was referencing the use of smart pointers. They are indeed very smart, but can be used stupidly as a bandaid kind of like .clone(). The difference really lies in the fact that i now have some data stored on the stack (The element) and some data stored on the heap because it's recursive. Was just a random example of where it's poor practice. As others have noted, linkedlists are a terrible data structure to begin with.