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In Java, your class extends Comparable, then provides a definition of comparesTo(). You can now use your class with anything that wants to sort or search. You could argue the difference is just semantics or syntactic sugar. Still, the concept and syntax of function pointers is considerably more difficult to understand, and results in code that isn't as checkable by the compiler and can cause really wacky things to happen if you mess it up. In C, if I accidentally pass my string compare function to qsort while I'm trying to sort an array of ints, the program will compile and run, and then screw up badly at runtime.

I think you just consider it simpler because it's what you're used to. For instance, it would take me a good while to figure out what you said about comparesTo(), simply because I'm not used to it. Also, your example covers custom sorting of objects, but not of first class types - how do I do a custom sort on strings, or ints, or something else atomic? Sure, you could wrap the primitive types in custom object classes and incur a significant performance penalty (an array of 10000 int's is going to need 10000 malloc's and subsequent free's), in addition to adding tons of lines of code (plus a few new extra classes/files), whereas in C the problem could have been solved efficiently in about half a dozen lines of code with no extra allocation needed.