In the tacit programming case, I'm pretty sure it's for (a) superficial resemblance, and (b) the excuse to call one's favoured technique "pointless programming".
(there's probably something interesting to be gotten at by considering how much violence a particular function does to structure in the input space —thinking of compositions of homomorphisms being homomorphisms of compositions, or how mapping a monotonic function over keys allows one to avoid reindexing— but I'm pretty sure that's mostly orthogonal to whether one binds parameter names or not)
(there's probably something interesting to be gotten at by considering how much violence a particular function does to structure in the input space —thinking of compositions of homomorphisms being homomorphisms of compositions, or how mapping a monotonic function over keys allows one to avoid reindexing— but I'm pretty sure that's mostly orthogonal to whether one binds parameter names or not)