yeah, I think lack of real anonymous functions is a small annoyance that can get quite "big" from the yucky feeling you get when defining functions just to pass

yeah, I think lack of real anonymous functions is a small annoyance that can get quite "big" from the yucky feeling you get when defining functions just to pass them on. But... what do you mean by "poor handling of closures in nested functions"? Edit: ok, I get what you mean now :) ...though I consider this "poor handling" a feature of Python - mutating outer scope variables is a side-effect and what it encourages is what I like to call "callback hell functions with data Javascript-style nightmare" :) (true, some people know to keep their sanity and write readable code even in this style, and if you enjoy it you're probably one of them few, but most don't...). By "functional style", I and some people refer to "functional as in mathematical functions", so only using side-effects when actually needed (yeah, some "extremist" languages like Haskell try to never do them, but...) and you get this by having immutable values and passing around anonymous functions (that don't modify their outer scope). ...and this is another part of the paradox: this "feature" of Python should encourage what I call functional style, but why oh why it doesn't? ...maybe Rich Hickey is on to something with Clojure and it's actually more about the data-structures than the language syntax or semantics?