What are python closures realy like?

[Paul Boddie]

Karl Kofnarson wrote:
>
> I wanted to have a function which would, depending on
> some argument, return other functions all having access to
> the same variable. An OO approach would do but why not
> try out closures...

I know that everyone will say that Python is a "multi-paradigm"
language and that one should feel free to use whatever technique seems
appropriate to solve the problem at hand, but it seems to me that
there's been an explosion in nested function usage recently, with lots
of code snippets showing them off either in the context of a debugging
exercise or as a proposed solution to a problem, and yet in many cases
their usage seems frivolous in comparison to plain old object-oriented
techniques.

I'm not pointing the finger at you here, Karl, since you seem to be
experimenting with closures, but why are they suddenly so fashionable?
Haven't the features supporting them existed in Python for a few
versions now? Don't people want to write classes any more?

Intrigued,

Paul