[lmm]

There are definitely cases where a structured value is clearer than a function. But at that point you're just modelling your domain and it's not really a "command pattern" at all. The point of the command pattern is that you have an object that really and truly is just a function, you're only representing it as an object because you need to pass it around - but in that case it really is just a workaround for your language lacking first-class functions.

A good language makes it easy to use both functions-as-values and structured-objects-as-callables, and use whichever representation is appropriate to the situation.

[trealira]

That's a fair point; not having first-class functions is a flaw for a high-level programming language, and the command pattern is just making up for a deficiency in the case that it would never need to be anything more than a closure in a language that does have one.