Matlab also recently has gotten much better in its support for function approaches. You need those for e.g. numerical integration and solving differential equations.

The earlier solvers took strings with the name of a function whenever they needed a functional argument. Nowadays Matlab provides `function handles' to refer to a function without calling it. The syntax is @function_name, they need this special syntax, because just mentioning function_name itself in your code, calls your function without arguments.

Matlab even support proper closures with lexical scoping, now.