Sure, being ideological and closed-minded is never a good thing. But one of the takeaways is that lambda expressions/anonymous functions, first-class functions

Sure, being ideological and closed-minded is never a good thing. But one of the takeaways is that lambda expressions/anonymous functions, first-class functions, and function closures, are very powerful tools that should be provided in any modern, high-level programming language. The fact that they're working on adding these features to Java 1.8 is testament. Would be nice if they could also add polymorphic function/method declarations and Hindley–Milner type inference, but oh well, you have to start somewhere...