In this new post to his site Matt Stauffer looks at the "higher order messaging" in Laravel's collections as a part of his series covering features in Laravel 5.4.

It seems like it was just last year that collection pipelines took over the Laravel world. Taylor had introduced collections to Laravel a while back but they sat somewhat under-appreciated until Adam Wathan wrote his book Refactoring to Collections about how they can transform the way you write a lot of your PHP code.

In Laravel 5.4, collections got a few boosts. Let’s take a look at a few.

He starts by talking about the higher order messaging design pattern and how it is different than just using something like foreach to iterate through a set. He then applies this to the Laravel collections, showing how they're implemented there via the "filter" and "pipe" methods.

In his latest post Mathias Verraes looks at "higher level programming" in PHP. Higher order programming is a style of programming that uses components (like functions, modules or objects) as values.

Let’s have some fun with higher order programming in PHP. I’ll start by showing how to program with Lambdalicious (or λlicious for friends) and introduce the real meat along the way. Don’t worry too much about the dark magic that may appear to power some of the features of Lambdalicious. It’s on GitHub if you’re curious. Just follow along and keep track of all the functions.

He breaks his examples up into (lots of) different examples, each with example code:

• Atoms
• Lists
• Functions
• Conditionals
• Loops & List Processing
• Deduplication
• Filter and Reduce
• Functions returning functions
• Partial Function Application
• Composition
• Piping

He finishes off the post talking about Lambdalicious and how, in reality, it's just not suitable for anything useful as written in PHP. The language just doesn't have the right functionality to make it work sufficiently...even HHVM.