> The point people miss is that that pain is actually a conscious part of the language design. That may be true, but it doesn't make it the right choice. And

> The point people miss is that that pain is actually a conscious part of the language design. That may be true, but it doesn't make it the right choice. And AFAIK Gosling himself has always been pro-closures, to remove this pain (see http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/closures http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/closures). >I'll admit to emotionally siding on the issue with the creators of Java and Python The big difference in Python is that there are "pythonic" alternatives for the really common cases. > nor is "what" implicitly superior all the time in all situations. I agree there is such a thing as too much abstraction, but I really don't think map/filter/etc fall into this category. These operations are so frequent that if you don't abstract the how, you end up repeating it thousands of times in a significant codebase. At that point I think you end up on the wrong side of the fence.