> First, anonymous inner classes do capture their lexical environment, and you can access outer variables provided they are declared as final.

Well, I admit I haven't written much in Java in years, but doesn't that mean they only capture a small part of their lexical environment --- an immutable part? And that means you can't write jQuery.each in Java, right? Any time you want to write a loop with data dependencies between iterations, you need to use some mechanism other than just mutation of variables from the outer scope?

> every example joel has given in his article doesn't rely on functions capturing their outer lexical environnment. mapping an add function to an array doesn't, and is still a very useful programming technique.

You are absolutely correct. Thank you. (That means you can do it in C with almost no trouble.)

> i feel more like you missed what joel had to say because you think joel should have introduced the full notion of what a first class function is.

See my other comment about "nitpicking" for my commentary on that.

> Well, I admit I haven't written much in Java in years, but doesn't that mean they only capture a small part of their lexical environment ...

They capture only the immutable variables. Wether that's a good or bad thing in itself is open to discussion, but that's clearly not the only problem with anonymous inner classes. Most people end up never using them where you would have passed a function just because it's so long and boilerplatey to do so.

> You are absolutely correct. Thank you. (That means you can do it in C with almost no trouble.)

Yeah that's right, and part of why i consider C being a less retarded language than java.

> See my other comment about "nitpicking" for my commentary on that

I read it, didn't really understand where you were going. You're first saying that joel is incorrect about some details in his article, but i've yet to see which ones. I see him overgeneralizing, sure. The point you then develop is that the fact that he is over-generalizing will harm newbies programmers.

This has been discussed a thousand times before in other contexts, but suffice to say that i profoundly disagree with that kind of statements, and that i find it weak to even go there.

First, you have no real proof of that, so even mentionning it, saying you are sure of it, is weak, you're basically saying "what you're written is gonna harm people", which is a pretty serious accusation in my opinion, without backing it with any facts at all.

Second, i really don't believe that even if it is true and you can prove it, the responsibility should be on the writer. No individual has a perfect knowledge of it's field, that's why it is your responsibility as an engineer to question the facts, and to demand hard data before you say something is true or false. If you fail to do that you have bigger problems than what Joel Splosky is writing on his blog.

In the end, and to explain more generally why i find your critique to be quite unfair, is that, while i agree that Joel is over generalizing, that things are far from being as simple as he is saying they are, the general idea , that i'm gonna sum up as "Having first class functions should be a basic building block of your language" is not only valid, but seriously needs to spread to the whole programming community.

It was because of such an article that i learnt functionnal programming in the first place. It probably wasn't this article, but it wasn't a lot better, maybe even worse. It doesn't mean that i think functionnal programming is the silver bullet to parallelism.

Well, java is retarded, so the standard trick is to declare an array of size one and declare the array itself as final. So you can't change the array object but you're certainly free to change the object it contains. Stupid? As all hell. Makes static local classes much closer to closures, though, even if twenty times as lengthy to write.