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In most written media, time progresses as you move down a page: mainstream computing languages are no different. Anonymous Closures are a language mechanism that, effectively, lets programmers create new control structures. Although people associate this power with exotic dynamic languages such as FORTH, Scheme and TCL, closures are becoming a feature of mainstream languages such as Javascript and PHP (and even static languages such as C#.) Although this article talks about issues that you’ll encounter in languages such as C# and Scheme, I’m going to focus on Javascript written on top of the popular JQuery library: I do that because JQuery is a great toolkit that lets programmers and designers of all skill levels do a lot by writing very little code. Because JQuery smooths away low-level details, it lets us clearly illustrate little weirdnesses of its programming model. Although things often work “just right” on the small scale, little strange things snowball in larger programs — a careful look atthe little problems is a key step towards the avoidance and mitigation of problems in big RIA projects.