Quiz Questions

What is the definition of a higher-order function?

Importance
Mid
Quiz Topics
JAVASCRIPT

A higher-order function is any function that takes one or more functions as arguments, which it uses to operate on some data, and/or returns a function as a result. Higher-order functions are meant to abstract some operation that is performed repeatedly. The classic example of this is map, which takes an array and a function as arguments. map then uses this function to transform each item in the array, returning a new array with the transformed data. Other popular examples in JavaScript are forEach, filter, and reduce. A higher-order function doesn't just need to be manipulating arrays as there are many use cases for returning a function from another function. Function.prototype.bind is one such example in JavaScript.

Map

Let say we have an array of names which we need to transform each string to uppercase.

const names = ['irish', 'daisy', 'anna'];

The imperative way will be as such:

const transformNamesToUppercase = function (names) {
const results = [];
for (let i = 0; i < names.length; i++) {
results.push(names[i].toUpperCase());
}
return results;
};
transformNamesToUppercase(names); // ['IRISH', 'DAISY', 'ANNA']

Use .map(transformerFn) makes the code shorter and more declarative.

const transformNamesToUppercase = function (names) {
return names.map((name) => name.toUpperCase());
};
transformNamesToUppercase(names); // ['IRISH', 'DAISY', 'ANNA']

References