Learning Scala

Chapter 5. First-Class Functions

One of the core values of functional programming is that functions should be first-class. The term indicates that they are not only declared and invoked but can be used in every segment of the language as just another data type. A first-class function may, as with other data types, be created in literal form without ever having been assigned an identifier; be stored in a container such as a value, variable, or data structure; and be used as a parameter to another function or used as the return value from another function.

Functions that accept other functions as parameters and/or use functions as return values are known as higher-order functions. You may have heard of two of the most famous higher-order functions, map() and reduce(). The map() higher-order function takes a function parameter and uses it to convert one or more items to a new value and/or type. The reduce() higher-order function takes a function parameter and uses it to reduce a collection of multiple items down to a single item. The popular Map/Reduce computing paradigm uses this concept to tackle large computing challenges, by mapping the computation across a range of distributed nodes and reducing their results back to a meaningful size.

One of the benefits of using higher-order functions to work with data is that the actual how of processing the data is left as an implementation detail to the framework that has the higher-order function. A caller can specify what should be done and ...