The name higher order functions come from the world of Mathematics, in there, a higher order function is also called functional, functional form or functor, and apparently, they take the difference between function and values, a bit more seriously than programming folks.

Another name that was given to higher order functions is first class functions. A very clever guy named Christopher Strachey coined the term sometime in the mid 60s.

So, if we can’t use “lower order functions” or first order functions to refer to our regular functions, we’ll just call them, well, functions.

Same difference

Java, C/C++ and Visual Basic and some other languages, don’t have higher order functions. At least at the time of this writing. The functions or methods or whatever it they may be called in those languages, cannot take in functions as parameters nor can they return functions. But hang on, of course those languages can take in functions as parameters, what about this code example

Listing 1-1. foo() and bar() example

public static void main(String []args) {
  bar(foo(2));
}

static void bar(int val) {
  System.out.println(val);
}

static int foo(int x) {
  return x * x;
}

Didn’t we just pass foo() to bar()? isn’t that passing a function to another function? That’s a no. Passing foo() to another function like bar() isn’t what we mean by a “function taking in another function as parameter”. Maybe if there was a way to pass foo without the parentheses, and then somewhere in the body of function bar (the receiving function), we get to invoke it like this

Listing 1-2. foo() and bar() examples, again

public static void main(String []args) {
  bar(foo);
}
static void bar(func val) {
  val(2)
}

But this isn’t doable in Java, nor is it doable in a language that doesn’t support higher order functions.

The code bar(foo(2)) means we are calling foo(2), it will be resolved to 4 and it’s type is int , then we get to call bar(), what’s being passed to to bar() isn’t the function definition of foo, but whatever value foo resolves to — which is 4 in our example, which is of type int. We’re not passing a function type because Java doesn’t have a function type, nor does C/C++ nor VB.

What does it look like

In a language that has support for higher order functions, like Kotlin, the foo and bar examples would have looked like this

Listing 1-3. foo() and bar() in functional style

fun foo(arg:Int): Int {              <1>
  return arg * arg
}

fun bar(fu:(arg:Int) -> Int) : Int { <2>
  return fu(2)                       <3>
}

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
  println(bar(::foo))                <4>
}

<1> This is a simple named function in Kotlin. It takes an Int and the function returns an Int as well. The function simply squares whatever Int you throw at it. We’re going to pass this function to another function (bar())

<2> Function bar() takes one input as parameter, this input is named fu but take note of how it’s type is declared; (arg:Int) -> Int — this is how a function type is declared in Kotlin. A function type has 3 parts, (1) the parameter list, if it doesn’t take any, it would just be a pair of parentheses, but in our case it takes on an Int (2) the arrow operator, it’s written as a dash or minus sign immediately followed by the greater than sign, some people call it the chevron symbol. This operator separates the parameter list and the return type. And finally (3) the return type of the function type. We intend to pass function foo() to function bar() and foo() returns an Int, hence, our function type in bar() should also return Int

<3> Now, we invoke fu and we pass the value 2 to it

<4> Now, we pass foo to bar(). Notice that we passed the param as foo and not foo(). We are not resolving the value of foo() and then passing it to bar(), were passing foo as a function definition, so that later on, we can invoke it from within the context of the receiving function

When a function can take in another function as a parameter, in the same vein that it can take in objects or values, it can be said that that language treats functions as first class citizens; in Kotlin, functions supports all the operations that are generally available to other entities like objects or values. It’s not simply a named collection of statements, it’s also a type

Why are we bothering

Because this gives us the ability to vary the compute process depending on the client. In Listing 1-3 (above) the client is the println() function, and the server is the bar() function. We’ve defined bar() to accept a function type that takes an Int and also returns and Int, we can pass any function to bar that meets this criteria, it may have a different implementation inside but so long as it takes in and returns an Int that should be fine. This is actually a design pattern called the Strategy Pattern. This pattern is from the gang of four (GoF), they wrote a book called Design Patterns, the Strategy pattern is one of them.

Does Kotlin itself use functionals

I don’t know that personally, but by reading through some of literature produced by that team and a quick look at some of Kotlin’s standard library e.g. “Standard.Kt” and some of the operations we can do on collections objects, I think the answer is “yes”.

If you’ve gone through any tutorial of the Kotlin language, there is a fair chance you’ve encountered some constructs that involved forEach, filter, map, with, apply and let to name a few. These things are higher order functions.