First of all, your objection to anonymous functions with an example that <i>names</i> the function in two different places kind of takes us off topic from the discussion of "anonymous" functions, but I will still respond.<p>Second of all, multiline-lambdas are already possible in Python, but they are not anonymous functions.<p>Anonymous functions, as I said, allow for rich syntax; they do not affect the Turing completeness of the language.  The context I am speaking of is "expressibility" in the sense of natural language, not whether or not something is expressible at all.<p>Ruby allows you to do stuff like this fairly naturally:<p>def process_event_until_timer_expires
  # check time, then call block only if
  # timer not expired
end<p>process_events_until_timer_expires { |t, event|
  puts t
  fire_event_downstream(event)
}<p>Having an anonymous function here allows you to read from outside in, which is more natural.  From the outside, you know you are in some event loop, then you can look inside the block to see the details of how the event are handled.  It's really that simple.  Not earth-shattering different than Python, just subtly different and more expressive.<p>I've been using Python for a decade, and Ruby's still overly exotic to me, so I am sympathetic to people that defend the more Pythonic approach.  But Ruby does allow for a different kind of expressiveness here.<p>Javascript also makes heavy use of anonymous functions, and if you use anonymous functions in other languages, you realize that they have value, even if they are occasionally abused and technically unnecessary.