You're assuming there would even be an array of callbacks if the code had been written in a different language, rather than the other language offering some nicer abstraction that eliminated the array. Having not seen the code, I can't be sure of this, but I know that, for instance, I rarely need to write array index arithmetic in the languages I usually work with (Python, JavaScript) whereas on the occasions I've dabbled with C such arithmetic came up constantly. If I introduced a nasty bug in some C code due to an array arithmetic error, arguing "Python wouldn't be any better because it doesn't do anything to make manually writing array index manipulations easier" would be missing the point.