"Joel unfortunately completely misses the point of why C and Java suck at this stuff: you can define anonymous functions in them (anonymous inner classes in Java) but they aren't closures."
You can't define anonymous functions in C.
And I wouldn't "attack" Joel for "stuffing the article full of lies". It's more like "abstracting away the details". When people talk of the benefits of some practice or programming paradigm, they don't always mention all the work going into it - they just explain the concept. That's what a good teacher does, IMO. He takes complex concepts and explains the important parts.
You are of course correct. I have corrected the parent post.
My point is, though, that you almost can't define anonymous functions in Python, either, but you can do nearly all of these clever patterns. The difference is that Python functions are closures.
> And I wouldn't "attack" Joel for "stuffing the article full of lies". It's more like "abstracting away the details".
I agree that that's what a good teacher does, but I don't see this article as doing that.
You can't define anonymous functions in C.
And I wouldn't "attack" Joel for "stuffing the article full of lies". It's more like "abstracting away the details". When people talk of the benefits of some practice or programming paradigm, they don't always mention all the work going into it - they just explain the concept. That's what a good teacher does, IMO. He takes complex concepts and explains the important parts.