You are right I think comparing merits of closures on just a comparison with for loops and lambdas alone is not comprehensive enough. Closures are called "A poor mans way of doing OO". And its in no way less powerful than any OO language I have seen. Javascript is a living example of this. I use currying so much in my production code base, to state one of the advantages of closures. The fact is that even if java can do this with inner classes and not natively means you have to write much more code. And more code for doing the same thing is only useful when it gives you more power. Even with MORE CODE to do closure simulation JAVA gives you only "INCOMPLETE" closures(final/class level variable access only in the inner scope). And for currying one says: "return new Function<K, V>(){ public void apply(...){...}}". Composing functions is also harder. So its not just for loop there is more to it.