Anonymous functions originate in the work of Alonzo Church in his invention of the lambda calculus, in which all functions are anonymous, in 1936, before electronic computers.[2] In several programming languages, anonymous functions are introduced using the keyword lambda, and anonymous functions are often referred to as lambdas or lambda abstractions. Anonymous functions have been a feature of programming languages since Lisp in 1958, and a growing number of modern programming languages support anonymous functions.