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.