Yeah, I learned about a bunch of the other algorithms later (forgetting the names, but stuff like "move to the next slot rather than putting collisions into buckets" and "hash a second time if you hit a collision"; I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the nuances).

> Closures seriously complicate language design and things get painful and counterintuitive unless you use lexical scope (or… you know… you like pain)

Well if you like both lexical scope and pain, there's always lisp!