[tchaffee]

Could you give a concrete example? Why wouldn't you be able to use first-class functions when building something up from user input? How about giving us a code snippet? The consensus in the CS community is that the command pattern disappears (becomes overkill) for languages with first-class functions. This has been noted as early as 1998 by Norvig when comparing C++ to Lisp. It's one of my criticisms of Addy's JS Patterns book. He just blindly copies the GoF patterns and many of them are not needed in languages with modern features.