[untitaker_]

I agreed with your original comment but this insistence on "functions never capture environments" is not useful when a really large portion of programmers come from those kinids of languages and are trying to learn Rust.

You can insist on correct terminology or adapt to your surroundings and try to speak the language of your target audience. I assume somebody who calls closures "anonymous functions" is speaking as a JavaScript developer to JavaScript developers. Even if not, it's not unreasonable to adopt the terminology of such a popular language.

[DonaldPShimoda]

The "problem" with your perspective, as I see it, is that it is not I who is entering a context. Rather, it is other people who are trying to learn about programming language theory and design; they are entering my context. So it's not up to them what the terms mean, really. The terms have established meanings.

It is true that a lot of language communities conflate terms, and this is especially prevalent among the people who are hobbyists and amateurs in the space --- an important community, to be sure! But not a group of people who are already knowledgeable.

When people from the lay community of Language X choose to get involved in the community of Language Y or, more importantly, the community of programming languages research, they often encounter friction because suddenly these terms that they previously believed to be synonymous actually have very distinct technical meanings. So that is why I try to address these conflations when I see them.

That said, I do make a point to state up-front that my notes are pedantic, because I know not everybody cares to learn about such things, and that's perfectly fine! But I will continue writing corrections when I see them, though I try hard to make my corrections kind in nature.