It s surely not intended as a JavaScript tutorial but you see you can t really discuss a programming language without delving into it s syntax Is this a bad thing I don t think so there are a lot of misconceptions about JavaScript many of those are caused by bad tutorials on the web and we can eliminate those by presenting a clear picture of the language I ve seen the statement that JavaScript doesn t support private members too often to be funny even on this page before I edited that out Stating in the article that JavaScript supports private members eliminates this misconception but you need a code sample to prove your point Since people can actually see with their own eyes how it works this adds to the credibility of the article So you want to discuss closures If you don t mention them the article fails to mention one of the defining properties of JavaScript If you do mention them the shortest and cleanest way to explain the concept is through a code sample As long as we structure the information in an appropriate way we need not necessarily be afraid that we ve got too much of it