Web Development with Clojure

Higher-Order Functions

Functions that take other functions as parameters are called higher-order functions. One example of such a function is map:

Here we pass in two parameters to map. The first parameter is an anonymous function that squares its argument and the second is a collection of numbers. The map function will visit each item in the collection and square it. One advantage of using higher-order functions is that we don’t have to worry about boundary conditions, such as nil checks. The iterator function handles these for us.

Another example of a higher-order function is filter. This function goes through a collection and keeps only the items matching the condition specified.