"Why contrive a name for something that will never be called anywhere else? Why contrive a name for a block of code that only makes sense in one place in the source?"

This is one of the compelling arguments for favoring C++11 over C++98(03): In older flavors of C++ the standard algorithms often required that a functor class be passed in, for example, as a comparator. Believe it or not (I'm sure you already know this, though), people had to go to all the trouble of creating a named class with an overloaded operator(), and then pass that named class to a standard algorithm just to do simple things like calling a sort routine, or a binary search routine on non-POD types. And even then it might be necessary to overload operator< as well. C++11 finally provided lambda functions, which allowed users to stop going through all the silly work just to create a comparator that would be used in only one place. In other words, in this regard, C++11 finally gained the ability to make something that should be simple, relatively easy as well, and this is one of the things that has made C++ fun, finally. Perl has had anonymous functions for...well, I don't know how long, but at least dating back to when sort and map made it into the language.

So what I don't get is, after all these years, and after so much work has gone into making older languages like C++ adopt the approach, why people still say, "now why would you want that?"