It's probably even more humorous if you understand that Scheme was created because Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Steele wanted a way to experiment with Carl Hewitt's actor model, which is based on message passing. Which, itself, was based on Simula, Smalltalk, etc.

Sussman and Steele came up with a way to do lexical scoping in a LISP, thus closures in LISP were born. They then acknowledged that actors and closures are essentially the same concept (I'm assuming with mutation, i.e. Scheme's "set!" and friends because otherwise message passing to update independent actors would be meaningless).

And to put the cherry on the top, what do Java, Common Lisp, and Scheme all have in common? Guy L. Steele worked on the language specs of all of those. Which makes the dig against Java a bit hilarious, though understandable.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

> [...] And by such examples one may be led into the functional style of programming, which is possible within Lisp/Scheme, though not required.