Lisp, 1958. Though technically they were invented in 1936 by Alonzo Church (in his Lambda Calculus).

There are function pointers in C and they are used to pass logic into C/C++ functions. They are not anonymous, and are more awkward to use than the new syntax, but they covered many use cases.

Exactly! Now it's time for the assembly language to get anonymous lambdas too :)

If only C++ was as useful as the odd bit of assembly programming.

I hope they at least beat Java to it.