[anttipoi]

Closures/lambdas in Java may affect how implementations of other JVM languages implement their corresponding features.

This may affect interoperability between languages positively. Currently JVM languages interoperate nicely with Java but advanced non-java-like features between other JVM-based languages do not match so well (can you pass a ruby block from JRuby to Scala?)

I think it was Neal Gafter who raised this as a good reason for closures in Java, but I could be mistaken.