That's definitely true and is a big tradeoff. I think it's a good one because people use drivers much more frequently than they write them, so in retrospect I t

That's definitely true and is a big tradeoff. I think it's a good one because people use drivers much more frequently than they write them, so in retrospect I think it was a good decision (though the jury's still out). Interestingly, the server protocol doesn't require the use of lambdas in the driver (and knows nothing about it). So in languages that don't support them, one could design a driver with a very different feel that work for that language, and it would still work well with RethinkDB. You could even write a completely string-based driver, and it would work well. (Though we didn't think through what a good C driver for Rethink would look like; we really wanted to focus on Ruby, Python, and JavaScript and offer a great experience in those languages).