In a recent post Pawel Turlejski takes a look at what he thinks is wrong with PHP closures as compared to syntax in a few other languages.

PHP 5.3, along with many other features, introduced closures. So now we can finally do all the cool stuff that Ruby / Groovy / Scala / any_modern_language guys can do, right? Well, we can, but we probably won't... Here's why.

He compares the PHP syntax for using closures/lambda functions with the abilities of Groovy and Scala. He does point out out that the ArrayObject wrapper does allow you to work a bit more fluently with the array's contents, but it's still not quite the same. According to him:

I'm sure closures will find their uses in the PHP world (like delayed execution or automated resource management), but IMHO replacing traditional loops and array operations is not one of them.