Discussion on: What language features/concepts do insiders of the language love and outsiders hate?

[Promise Tochi]

Javascript:
Prototypal inheritance
Lexical scoping and closures.

The fact that you can construct almost any traditional design pattern with the above.

Closures and first class functions are also powerful instruments in functional javascript.

Also:

,,,;

[Rick]

Who is complaining about Lexical scoping? A bunch of Lisp diehards?

[Promise Tochi]

Lol. No one really. Just necessary to point out what's possible with Prototypal inheritance.

[Simon Proctor]

Well I'd say Javascript only recently got proper lexical scoping with let before that you had global and function level and all the weirdness that brought about.

Plus prototypal inheritance is wonderful and it's a damn shame it confuses so many people.

[Geoff Davis]

Love first class functions. I miss that perhaps the most when programming in the other scripting language I use the most: PHP.

[Max Cerrina]

...doesn't PHP have first class functions? I thought first-class functions meant you could use them as arguments or assign them to a variable, e.g.:

<?php

$some_function_holding_var = 
        function($inner_arg) 
        { 
            echo "I'm a function saying $inner_arg!"; 
        };

$some_function_holding_var("hello");

// okay, not very random
$random_array = [1,2,3,4];

array_walk($random_array, 
        function(&$number) 
        {
            ++$number;
        });

print_r($random_array);

$pick_func_based_on_time = 
    function ($some_time) 
    {
        $even_function = function () {echo "even";};
        $odd_function = function () {echo "odd";};

        switch ($some_time % 2) 
        {
            case 0:
                return $even_function;
                break;
            case 1:
                return $odd_function;
                break;
            default:
                echo "I broke math...";
                break;
        }
    };

$chosen_function = $pick_func_based_on_time(microtime(true));

$chosen_function();

I'm honestly just curious as to if there's a meaning of first-class functions I'm missing. (And enjoyed the chance to do ridiculous code stuff.)

[Promise Tochi]

That's pretty much it. First class function means you can use functions wherever normal language primitives will go. It can be returned, used in expressions...