Rahul Agarwal explains how higher-order functions make your life easier:
As a part of the functional programming paradigm, whatever logic we need to write is to be implemented in terms of pure and immutable functions. Here, functions take arguments from other functions as input and return values/functions which used by other functions for further processing. Here, pure means that the function does not produce any side-effects like printing to the console and immutable means that the function takes in and produces immutable data(val) only.
Higher-order functions comply with the above idea. As compared to for loops, we can iterate a data structure using higher-order functions with much less code.
The term “higher-order function” can sound a bit overwhelming if you’re completely unfamiliar, but it’s a pretty simple concept: a function which takes another function as (at least) one of its inputs. As Rahul points out, this is quite the useful concept.