How to explain callbacks in plain english? How are they different from calling one function from another function?

Question

How to explain callbacks in plain English? How are they different from calling one function from another function taking some context from the calling function? How can thei

Answer 1

Imagine a friend is leaving your house, and you tell her "Call me when you get home so that I know you arrived safely"; that is (literally) a call back. That's what a callback function is, regardless of language. You want some procedure to pass control back to you when it has completed some task, so you give it a function to use to call back to you.

In Python, for example,

grabDBValue( (lambda x: passValueToGUIWindow(x) ))

grabDBValue could be written to only grab a value from a database and then let you specify what to actually do with the value, so it accepts a function. You don't know when or if grabDBValue will return, but if/when it does, you know what you want it to do. Here, I pass in an anonymous function (or lambda) that sends the value to a GUI window. I could easily change the behavior of the program by doing this:

grabDBValue( (lambda x: passToLogger(x) ))

Callbacks work well in languages where functions are first class values, just like the usual integers, character strings, booleans, etc. In C, you can "pass" a function around by passing around a pointer to it and the caller can use that; in Java, the caller will ask for a static class of a certain type with a certain method name since there are no functions ("methods," really) outside of classes; and in most other dynamic languages you can just pass a function with simple syntax.

Protip:

In languages with lexical scoping (like Scheme or Perl) you can pull a trick like this:

my $var = 2;
my $val = someCallerBackFunction(sub callback { return $var * 3; });
# Perlistas note: I know the sub doesn't need a name, this is for illustration

$val in this case will be 6 because the callback has access to the variables declared in the lexical environment where it was defined. Lexical scope and anonymous callbacks are a powerful combination warranting further study for the novice programmer.